Self-help books on romantic relationships between women and men exaggerate gender differences

What is it about?

We critiqued a popular book (Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus [Gray, 1972]) that contained two lists of relationship preferences, one for women and one for men. We took the items from the lists and created three versions — one stereotypically feminine, one stereotypically masculine, and one neutral — but without any labels. College students recognized the stereotyping, but preferred the neutral versions. This suggests that a book like Gray's is creating a gender dichotomy rather than accurately representing the state of gender differences in relationship preferences.

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