Influence of motivation and task difficulty on gender discrimination judgements

A study is reported examining how motivation to detect salary discrimination influences its detection depending on the difficulty of the detection task. Subjects were presented with information about the qualifications and salaries of female and male managers in 10 departments of a hypothetical company. This information was created so that female managers were undercompensated relative to their qualifications. The main dependent variable was subjects' ratings of gender discrimination. Independent variables were motivation and task difficulty. Based on Hull's drive theory an interaction effect was predicted and found: when the judgement task was easy, more gender discrimination was detected when motivation to detect discrimination was high rather than low, whereas when the judgement task was difficult, more gender discrimination was detected when motivation to detect discrimination was low rather than high. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.