What Is a Specialist? Effects of the Male Concept of a Successful Academic Person on Performance in a Thinking Task1

For many persons the prototypical successful academic person is male. In three studies, the effects of this belief on types of solutions to a thinking task will be shown. In Study 1 (N=144), it is demonstrated that people have ma jor difficulties finding a solution that refutes this belief. In Study 2 ( N=21), which uses an equivalent formulation of the thinking problem whose solution corresponds to the male-associat ed successful academic person, the level of difficulty sinks dramatically. Participants from Study 3 ( N=200), who were primed with a story of either an academically successful woman or man before receiving the thinking task were female and male university students from Germany and Israel in a counterbalanced design. The results show that a successful solution requires a restructuring of the thinking task that is based on the availability and accessibility of alternatives. In the discussion, the effects of the male-dominant interpretation of an academically successful person on Israeli and German women and men will be dealt with and starting points for change will be discussed.