Association of Cognitive Biases with Gender Role Stereotyping

Stereotypes are created through certain cognitive processes. These decision making and meaning making processes involve heuristics that lead to cognitive biases. The present study explored how cognitive biases are related with gender role stereotypes specifically in the context of women empowerment in Pakistan. The study employed a convenience sample of 171 participants. The tools utilized were: Attitude Rating Scale Towards Women Empowerment Scale (Shuja et a., 2020) and Perception of Cognitive Biases in Decision Making Scale (PCBDM-S) (Ay & Özdemir, 2025). Pearson correlation revealed that no consistent relationship existed between cognitive biases and attitude towards women empowerment. However age was found to be a significant predictor of cognitive biases; more the age lesser the cognitive biases, although age accounted for only 5.7 percent of variability in cognitive biases. Age was also not found to be significantly related with attitude towards women empowerment. The findings indicated that perceived cognitive biases and gender role stereotyping specifically in terms of perception of women empowerment are unrelated constructs. The implications of results were discussed in the context of possible limitations of method.