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In five studies, we explored how expectations and memory for a target's facial appearance vary as a function of whether that face is said to belong to a transgender or cisgender (i.e., non-transgender) individual. Participants in each study were randomly assigned to either a transgender or a cisgender target. In Study 1, participants indicated how feminine and masculine they expected the target to look. In Study 2, participants were shown an image of the target's face (which was androgynous in all conditions) and asked to rate how feminine and masculine the face appeared. In Studies 3, 4, and 5, participants were shown the same image of the target's face and later instructed to identify it from an array of faces. Results from these studies revealed that supposedly cisgender targets' faces are expected to look, evaluated, and remembered as more gender congruent than supposedly transgender targets' faces. Potential implications of these findings are discussed.

Increasing evidence suggests that bisexual people are sometimes evaluated more negatively than heterosexual and gay/lesbian people. A common theoretical account for this discrepancy argues that bisexuality is perceived by some as introducing ambiguity into a binary model of sexuality. The present brief report tests a single key prediction of this theory, that evaluations of bisexual people have a unique relationship with Need for Closure (NFC), a dispositional preference for simple ways of structuring information. Participants ( n = 3406) were heterosexual medical students from a stratified random sample of 49 U.S. medical schools. As in prior research, bisexual targets were evaluated slightly more negatively than gay/lesbian targets overall. More importantly for the present investigation, higher levels of NFC predicted negative evaluations of bisexual people after accounting for negative evaluations of gay/lesbian people, and higher levels of NFC also predicted an explicit evaluative preference for gay/lesbian people over bisexual people. These results suggest that differences in evaluations of sexual minority groups partially reflect different psychological processes, and that NFC may have a special relevance for bisexual targets even beyond its general association with prejudice. The practical value of testing this theory on new physicians is also discussed.

People think of certain social roles (e.g., scientists) as being men, but perhaps even more fundamentally, people also tend to think of a person as a man. People list men more often than women as examples of humanity and describe men with generic labels (e.g., the person) but use gender-specific labels (e.g., the woman) for women. This is especially true of male respondents. Much of the research on this androcentric tendency to conflate men with people has measured more controllable behaviors. The present studies instead investigated androcentrism using adaptations of the implicit association test (IAT). The IAT more closely captures theoretically relevant categorization cognitive processes; responses on the IAT are more difficult to control and thus suitable for socially-sensitive topics like gender bias; and the IAT can help to explain gender differences in androcentrism. Results from three studies showed that participants associated broad human concepts (e.g., person) with men more than women (Studies 1–3), and gender-specific concepts (e.g., woman) with women more than men (Studies 2–3). These IAT associations were larger for male (vs. female) participants (Studies 1–3) and for participants exposed to a male-emphasizing (vs. gender-inclusive) term for humanity (i.e., mankind; Study 3). Participants were also more likely to notice a semantic redundancy between being male and being human compared to the same redundancy concerning women (Studies 2–3). Together, these findings support a categorization-based theoretical account of androcentrism, advancing understanding of the nature of androcentrism and gender differences therein.

A review of the literature on cultural aspects of nonverbal communication reveals the existence of both similarities and differences in the display of nonverbal behavior. It is argued that similarities are most manifest when analysis is at the level of the individual and the focus is on the objective, formal properties of the behavior; differences are more likely to become manifest when the analysis is at the level of the relationship between individuals and the focus is on the interpersonal import of the behavior. Material on gaze and eye contact, body motion and gesture, interpersonal distance and touch, facial expression, and paralanguage is surveyed and organized into three primary sections. The sections reflect the major functions nonverbal behavior is presumed to perform: (1) the sending of emotional states; (2) the conveying of interpersonal attitudes, particularly intimacy and status; and (3) the management of conversation. Implications are drawn concerning potential miscommunication in intercultural encounters.

This paper describes the Knowledge Acquisition Grid, developed to assist knowledge engineers in the manual transfer of expertise. The Grid is used in a knowledge-acquisition module which itself is part of a larger program designed to train people in knowledge engineering techniques offered by Digital Equipment Corporation. The Grid describes a two-dimensional space in which five forms of expert knowledge and six basic types of interview questions constitute the horizontal and vertical dimensions respectively. Description of the rationale, dimensions, components, and strategy for use of the Grid in the knowledge-acquisition component of building an expert system is provided along with discussion of the need for greater attention in general to the social psychology of expert interviewing.