A new study published in Violence and Gender has found that when people witness aggressive behavior, they pay more attention to female aggressors than to male ones — both in terms of how quickly they look at them and how long they continue to watch. Yet when it comes to judging the intentions and blameworthiness of those actions, participants tended to view male and female aggressors similarly.
These findings, drawn from a series of three experiments, suggest that observers may find female aggression more attention-grabbing because it conflicts with social expectations, not because they see it as more harmful or intentional.
The research was conducted to explore how gender stereotypes shape our attention and judgments in response to aggression. Previous studies have shown that men are more likely than women to use direct physical violence, and that women tend to engage in less visible forms of aggression, such as gossip or social exclusion. As a result, people may have different expectations of aggressive behavior depending on the gender of the person involved.
The researchers wanted to know whether this mismatch between expectation and behavior might cause people to scrutinize female aggressors more closely — and whether that scrutiny would affect how intentional or blameworthy their actions are perceived to be.
To explore these questions, researchers conducted three separate studies. In the first two, participants from the general public were shown images of aggressive interactions between two people, while their eye movements were tracked. Some scenes were ambiguous, meaning it wasn’t entirely clear whether harm was intentional, while others depicted clearly hostile behavior. The third study involved incarcerated violent offenders — individuals who are more familiar with aggressive behavior — to see if they responded differently.
In the first study, 122 adults (mostly in their twenties) viewed ambiguous scenes that could be interpreted in more than one way. These scenes showed two individuals, one potentially causing harm to the other. Each scene had both a male and a female version, so participants would see, for example, a woman shoving another person in one image, and a man doing the same thing in another. While participants looked at the scenes, an eye-tracking device recorded how long they spent looking at each face, and how quickly they first looked at the harm-doer.
After viewing each scene, participants were asked to rate how intentional the harmful behavior seemed and how much blame the aggressor deserved. The researchers found that participants looked faster and longer at the faces of female aggressors compared to male ones. However, they did not see female harm-doers as more intentional than male ones. If anything, women were slightly less likely to be blamed.
In the second study, the researchers replicated this design with another 120 participants, this time including both ambiguous and clearly hostile scenes where the harm-doer’s intentions were unmistakable. Again, the results showed that participants oriented more quickly to female harm-doers and spent more time looking at their faces. But when it came to judgments of intention and blame, there were no clear differences between male and female aggressors. This was true even when the aggression was clearly deliberate.
The third study brought in a very different group: 60 imprisoned individuals who had committed violent offenses, including assault and robbery. This group had more firsthand experience with aggressive behavior and might be expected to have different responses. The researchers again found that participants oriented faster to female aggressors, especially in clearly hostile scenes. In those cases, female faces held their attention longer than male ones.
However, these inmates did not generally judge female aggressors to be more blameworthy than male ones. The only exception came from the female offenders, who were more likely to judge female aggressors as acting intentionally — perhaps reflecting their own lived experiences or expectations.
Taken together, the three studies suggest that people pay more visual attention to female aggressors, even when they don’t judge their actions more harshly. The researchers believe this may be because female aggression stands out as unexpected. Social norms typically associate physical aggression with men, and seeing a woman act violently may prompt people to look longer and more quickly, perhaps to try to make sense of what they’re seeing. This tendency may reflect a kind of cognitive dissonance, where observers try to resolve a mismatch between a stereotype (women are nurturing and nonviolent) and what they are witnessing.
Interestingly, this heightened visual attention did not translate into stronger moral judgment. Across all three studies, female harm-doers were judged as roughly equally intentional as male ones, and sometimes even less blameworthy. This suggests that while female aggression might capture people’s attention, it does not necessarily provoke harsher condemnation — at least in the kinds of situations presented in the study.
There are several possible explanations for this pattern. One is that people may assume that if a woman is being physically aggressive, she must have a good reason for it — possibly because such behavior runs against societal expectations. Another is that people may still hold on to subtle forms of bias that excuse or minimize female aggression more readily than male aggression. This idea, often referred to as “benevolent sexism” or “benevolent genderism,” suggests that women may benefit from assumptions that they are inherently less violent or more morally upright.
The study also highlights the difference between automatic attention and conscious judgment. People’s eyes were drawn more quickly and for longer to female aggressors — an automatic, bottom-up process that likely reflects a need to process surprising or novel stimuli. But when asked to reflect on what they saw and assign blame or intent, participants relied on more deliberate, top-down reasoning, which appeared to be less influenced by the aggressor’s gender.
Future research could explore whether similar patterns hold in real-life scenarios or dynamic video footage, rather than still images. It could also examine whether these visual and cognitive responses are affected by the race, age, or other characteristics of the aggressors. Understanding how these social cues influence perception and judgment has important implications — especially in fields like criminal justice, where assumptions about intent and blame can have serious consequences.
The study, “Judgment and Attention Toward Male and Female Harm-Doers: An Eye-Tracking Investigation in Community Adults and Inmates,” was authored by Anna Zajenkowska, Marta Bodecka, Ewa Duda, Izabela Kazmierczak, Adrianna Jakubowska, Anna Zarazinska-Chrominska, Claire Lawrence, and Łukasz Okruszek.
