Of minds and men

April Bailey, Nicholas DiMaggio

Dec 11, 16-18 UTC+0, April H. Bailey (University of Edinburgh); Nicholas DiMaggio (University of Chicago, Booth), Of minds and men

Abstract: Prior work finds that seemingly generic and gender-inclusive concepts such as ‘person’ and ‘humanity’ elicit male bias in practice. When prompted to think of an example of a person, people are more likely to generate men than women. In the present work, we tested whether male bias might also emerge about an even more fundamental concept, that of a ‘mind.’ We found evidence that entities perceived to have more complex minds were also more likely to be gendered as male than female. We found this about human entities that varied in perceived mind as well as about non-human animal entities.