Romance novels pose a fascinating conundrum. On the one hand, romance is the second-most popular genre of fiction, but on the other it is viewed almost universally as being of poor literary quality. It is possible that these negative evaluations stem from the association between romance and women, mirroring the bias against women authors for other genres. To explore this possibility, we examined how people evaluate books attributed to male and female authors, and whether any negative evaluations of romance novels are based on their association with women rather than their content, with two pre-registered studies. In Study 1, participants read identical passages attributed to either male or female authors and evaluated them along seven dimensions (N = 167). Study 2 extended this work using a similar design, adding attributions of genre: either romance or literary fiction (N = 128). Linear mixed-effects modeling was employed to analyze all results. Study 1 demonstrated a slight preference for books attributed to males over females, with more negative evaluations of passages attributed to female authors in general. In Study 2, however, there were no strong differences in how passages were evaluated, based on either the attributed genre or author gender. The effect of author gender in Study 1 suggests there is some bias against female authors, even when the actual text is held constant. However, Study 2 suggests there is something besides the label of ‘Romance’ that drives negative evaluations of romance novels.
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The lack of differences in evaluation based on genre observed here is interesting given the seemingly universal low regard for romance novels. If people judge excerpts attributed to romance as equivalent to those attributed to literary fiction, then perhaps these prejudices are not strong enough to shape evaluations of actual text when it is in front of someone. This would mean that it is the actual subject matter or content that people find objectionable. As evidence in support of this possibility, during debriefing multiple participants mentioned that they did not think the passages were particularly romantic given that they were from romance novels. This demonstrates that the actual content (held constant across genres) may drive most of these evaluations. In truth, one of the passages was actually taken from a romance novel. In addition, we purposefully chose passages that suggested a lead up to a romantic interaction, although none included a scene that was explicitly sexual or romantically-charged. Thus, participant judgments seem to have been based primarily on the actual content of the passage, rather than the genre to which they were attributed. It may be that romance novels are inherently of lower quality than other genres and, had more passage from romance novels been included, those would have been rated lower regardless of what genre they were purported to be from. (53-54)
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Note, therefore, that this study was not evaluating readers' responses to actual romance novels.
Here's the abstract:
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Note, therefore, that this study was not evaluating readers' responses to actual romance novels.