Exploring the nature of the gender-congruency effect: implicit gender activation and social bias

Frontiers in Psychology

Psychology

Francesca Pesciarelli¹  Ana Rita Sá-Leite²  Daniela Paolieri³  Alba Casado³ 

[1] Department of Biomedical, Metabolic and Neural Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy;Department of Social Psychology, Basic Psychology and Methodology, University of Santiago de Compostela, A Coruña, Spain;Institut für Romanische Sprachen und Literaturen, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany;Mind, Brain, and Behavior Research Center, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Granada, Granada, Spain;Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Granada, Granada, Spain;

关键词: gender-congruency effect;    gender-priming;    grammatical gender activation;    gender stereotype;    gender identity;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1160836

 received in 2023-02-07, accepted in 2023-05-05,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The aim of the study was to explore the nature of the gender-congruency effect, characterized by a facilitation on the processing of congruent words in grammatical gender. Moreover, we explored whether resemblances between gender identities and gender attitudes with grammatical gender modulated lexical processing. We designed a gender-priming paradigm in Spanish, in which participants decided the gender of a masculine or feminine pronoun preceded by three different primes: biological gender nouns (mapping biological sex), stereotypical nouns (mapping biological and stereotypical information), and epicene nouns (arbitrary gender assignment). We found faster processing of gender congruent pronouns independently of the type of prime, showing that the grammatical gender feature is active even when processing bare nouns that are not conceptually related to gender. This indicates that the gender-congruency effect is driven by the activation of the gender information at the lexical level, which is transferred to the semantic level. Interestingly, the results showed an asymmetry for epicene primes: the gender-congruency effect was smaller for epicene primes when preceding the feminine pronoun, probably driven by the grammatical rule of the masculine being the generic gender. Furthermore, we found that masculine oriented attitudes can bias language processing diminishing the activation of feminine gender, which ultimately could overshadow the female figure.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Casado, Sá-Leite, Pesciarelli and Paolieri.