The impact of white androgynous faces on binary gender categorization
Date
2024
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Gender categorization is the use of visually derived semantic information to spontaneously sort individuals into socially established gender groups. Lack of gender-prototypicality disrupts the speed of binary gender categorization (Freeman et al., 2008) and gender non-conformity has been shown to lead to increased gender identity denial (Morgenroth et al., 2023). Limited research has used wholly gender-ambiguous stimuli, however, to examine the categorization of androgynous individuals. In this series of preregistered studies, we investigated the impact of androgyny on the binary gender categorization of faces. Participants categorized masculine, feminine, and androgynous white faces as men or women using a mouse-tracking design. Overall white androgynous faces produced significantly longer response times and less direct mouse trajectories compared to gender typical (masculine and feminine) faces. This indicates a higher level of competition between categories during the categorization of androgynous stimuli as a binary gender category compared to the categorization of gender typical stimuli. These results suggest androgyny acts as a disruptive force on spontaneous binary gender categorization. White androgynous faces were also significantly more likely to be categorized as woman than man, suggesting there are stricter expectations of prototypicality for the category of man compared to the category of woman.
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Keywords
Androgyny, Binary gender, Mouse-tracking, Social cognition