Investigation of gender bias in the mental imagery of faces

People tend to think of the prototypical person as a man more than as a woman, but this bias has primarily been observed in language-based tasks. Here, we investigated whether this bias is also present in the mental imagery of faces. A preregistered cross-cultural reverse-correlation study including...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Group processes & intergroup relations 2024-09, Vol.27 (6), p.1376-1402
Main Authors: Kunst, Jonas R., Juettemeier, Marilena, Bailey, April H., Anjum, Gulnaz, English, Alexander S., Obaidi, Milan, Sam, David L., Yaşın-Tekizoğlu, Fatma, Agyemang, Collins B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bias
Gender differences
Gender inequality
Imagery
Mental imagery
Sexism
Women
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:People tend to think of the prototypical person as a man more than as a woman, but this bias has primarily been observed in language-based tasks. Here, we investigated whether this bias is also present in the mental imagery of faces. A preregistered cross-cultural reverse-correlation study including participants from six WEIRD and non-WEIRD countries varying in gender equality (i.e., China, Ghana, Norway, Pakistan, Turkey, and the US; N = 645) unexpectedly suggested that people imagine the face of a generic “person” more as a woman than as a man. Replicating this unexpected result, a second preregistered study (N = 115) showed that U.S. participants imagine the face of a typical person as being more similar to their imagined face of a woman than of a man. We discuss explanations for these unexpected findings, including the possibility that the prototypical person is male-biased—consistent with previous work—but the default face may be female-biased.
ISSN:1368-4302
1461-7188
DOI:10.1177/13684302231200168