Flexibility in Continuous Judgments of Gender/Sex and Race

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. General 2024-12, Vol.153 (12), p.2931-2950
• Main Authors: Atwood, S., Gibson, Dominic J., Briones Ramírez, Sofía, Olson, Kristina R.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Experiences (Events); Experimental psychology; Face; Face Perception; Facial Recognition - physiology; Female; Gender differences; Gender Identity; Human; Humans; Information; Judgment; Male; Personal experiences; Racial Groups - psychology; Social Categorization; Social Cognition; Social Perception; Transgender persons; Transgender Persons - psychology; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0096-3445; 1939-2222; 1939-2222
• DOI: 10.1037/xge0001512

Across six preregistered studies (N = 1,292; recruited from university subject pools and Prolific Academic), we investigate how face perception along the dimensions of gender/sex and race can vary based on immediate contextual information as well as personal experience. In Studies 1a and 1b, we find that when placing stimuli along a continuum from male to female, cisgender participants sort prototypical gender/sex faces in a bimodal fashion and show less consensus and greater error when placing faces of intermediate gender/sex. We replicate and extend these findings to race in Study 2. In Study 3, we test whether sorting patterns can be influenced by preexisting experiences, and find evidence that transgender/nonbinary participants show less error than cisgender heterosexual participants when sorting intermediary faces. Finally, in Studies 4 and 5, we test whether cisgender participants' judgments of intermediary faces along the continuum are influenced by the specific circumstances under which they are asked to sort. Here, we find that changing the sorting framework to include a third category resulted in less error when placing intermediary faces along the continuum than when participants were provided with only two category labels or two categories and a line at the midpoint, suggesting that new perceptual categories introduced with minimal training can be adopted quickly and successfully in a perceptual task. These data suggest that both long-term life experiences and quick experimental interventions can shape how we think about gender/sex and race. Public Significance Statement As scientists and as a society, we often describe social dimensions categorically, using terms like male and female, man and woman, or Black, Asian, and White. Yet in reality, these are continuous dimensions wherein people can be intersex, nonbinary, multiracial, or use other terms to describe themselves and others. This work investigates gender/sex and race face perception, with a focus on how less discrete, more intermediate faces are perceived. Across six studies, we find that people are influenced by both well-known labels (e.g., Black, White, man, and woman) as well as personal experience when sorting faces that vary by gender/sex and race. This both reaffirms the importance of category labels in our thinking about social categories and suggests that these categories might be more flexible than previously acknowledged.