Alice Hendrickson Eagly

Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois ~James Padilla Chair of Arts and Sciences; Professor of Psychology. Social psychologist and leader in modern attitude research. Among the first to recognize psychology's cognitive revolution in attitude research by examining attribution, information-processing, salience, and memory effects in persuasion. Reviews include an upper-level, classic book and definitive handbook articles on attitude structure and function. Best-known contribution, social role theory of sex differences and similarities, shows how gender roles influence male and female behavior. Authoritative meta-analyses of gender, stereotypes, and leadership emphasize how people observe, judge, and evaluate the interplay between gender and leadership. Book on role congruity theory shows that regardless of candidates' strengths, women are evaluated less favorably than men as potential leaders in male-dominated settings and less favorably when they enact role-prescribed leader behavior. Work also shows that the ways women typically lead-democratically and with attention to building positive relationships-are generally appreciated. Other papers argue that many evolutionary psychology claims about sex differences in mate preferences can be explained as consequences of the social roles most frequently occupied by men and women.~~