I'm sure everyone is going to be talking about this, because if taken at face value, it would seem to have enormous importance.
NEW YORK - A man who gets angry at work may well be admired for it but a woman who shows anger in the workplace is liable to be seen as "out of control" and incompetent, according to a new study presented on Friday...
She conducted three tests in which men and women recruited randomly watched videos of a job interview and were asked to rate the applicant's status and assign them a salary.In the first, the scripts were identical except where the candidate described feeling either angry or sad about losing an account due to a colleague's late arrival at a meeting.
Participants conferred the most status on the man who said he was angry, the second most on the woman who said she was sad, slightly less on the man who said he was sad, and least of all by a sizable margin on the woman who said she was angry.
The average salary assigned to the angry man was almost $38,000 compared to about $23,500 for the angry woman and in the region of $30,000 for the other two candidates.
But I'd really love to know more about her methodology here. How, for example, did she control for the wide variety of other personal characteristics that we know are at work in interpersonal communication? Identical scripts isn't enough; to truly learn something here you would need to run this experiment with identical people reading these different scripts. Otherwise there are simply too many unaccounted for variables for this study to be taken seriously.
Perhaps that's addressed in the paper, but from everything I've read I can't really tell. Anyone know where I can find the actual paper?
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