Gender Identity Salience and Perceived Vulnerability to Breast Cancer

Steven Sweldens, Stefano Puntoni and Nader Tavassoli

ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: Contrary to predictions based on cognitive accessibility, heightened gender identity salience resulted in lower perceived vulnerability and reduced donation behavior to identity-specific risks (e.g., breast cancer). No such effect was manifest with identity-neutral risks. Establishing the importance of self-identity, perceived breast cancer vulnerability was lower when women were primed with their own gender, but not with the general category of gender. Establishing the involvement of unconscious defense mechanisms, fear appraisal prior to the risk rating task eliminated the effect of a gender identity prime on perceived breast cancer vulnerability. The findings have direct implications for health communication and donation campaigns.

Keywords: awareness campaigns; breast cancer vulnerability; gender identity salience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C44 D8 M M31 M37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-10-20
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/13613/ERS-2008-063-MKT.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ems:eureri:13613

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePub ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).