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The present review examines bias against transgender women and men and bias against people with nonbinary gender identities. A central contention is that many people hold false beliefs about transgender men’s and women’s membership in the categories “male” and “female,” and, separately, view nonbinary gender identities themselves as illegitimate. Both discounting transgender men’s and women’s membership in the categories “male” and “female” and discounting the validity of nonbinary gender identities are forms of bias, and examining them is key to developing a nuanced understanding of the biases that target transgender and nonbinary people. The authors review the literature on bias against transgender people and bias against nonbinary people, discuss the methodological and theoretical challenges in studying these biases, propose an approach for interpreting results, and consider avenues for future research.

Bisexual people may appear to have more potential romantic partners than people only attracted to one gender (e.g., heterosexual, gay, lesbian people). However, bisexual people's dating choices are limited by non-bisexual people's reluctance to date bisexual people. Studies have indicated that some heterosexual, gay, and lesbian people are reluctant to date bisexual people, particularly bisexual men. We extend current understandings of gendered anti-bisexual bias through investigating heterosexual, bisexual, gay, and lesbian people's reported willingness to date within and outside of their sexual orientation groups. Participants (

Although considerable research has examined how members of advantaged groups think and feelabout disadvantaged groups, fewer studies have examined responses to “intermediate” social groups—groups that are perceived to fall between more commonly acknowledged groups on the same dimension of social identity. We measured judgments of intermediate groups, including novel groups designed to manipulate social group intermediacy (Studies 1-5), Black/White biracial people (Study 6), and bisexual people (Study 7). In each study, participants provided separate evaluations of an intermediate group and two comparison groups (e.g., Black/White biracial people, Black people, White people). Intermediate groups were consistently rated as less conceptually legitimate (e.g., less distinctive, not a “real” group) than other groups. The view that intermediate groups are not “real” groups helped explain negative evaluations of them, and participants who strongly identified with an advantaged ingroup were especially prone to this pattern of judgments. These results are consistent with the idea that an intermediate group can threaten the distinctiveness of a valued ingroup, leading people to dismiss and denigrate the intermediate group. Studying perceptions of intermediate groups facilitates a nuanced account of an increasingly heterogeneous social world.

People rapidly form impressions of others based on their gender. Women tend to be liked more than men but men tend to be regarded as more powerful. However, a person’s nonverbal behavior has the potential to confirm or override these stereotypical impressions. Specifically, expansive, open body postures (e.g., based on widespread limbs) tend to convey high power compared to contracted, closed body positions. In three studies, we tested whether postural variations affected evaluations of men and women and impressions of their power. In Study 1, images of women elicited a more positive reactions than images of men in an affective misattribution procedure, but only when women enacted contracted body postures. In Studies 2 and 3, participants were slower to classify images of expansive postures as high power when enacted by women and slower to classify contracted postures as low power when enacted by men, but rated men and women similarly in explicit power-related judgments. Expansive body postures thus appeared to eliminate the usual positive reaction to women relative to men, but women still did not implicitly convey power to the same degree as men. Gender did not interfere with explicit, more controlled judgments of power. Together these studies demonstrate that gender implicitly interferes with perceptions of a person’s power, even in the presence of potentially individuating body postures.

Concern that masculine generic language (e.g., man to mean humanity) perpetuates gender inequity has led several institutions to formally discourage its use. While previous experimental research indicates that generic terms like man bring more exemplars of men than women to mind, only recently have researchers begun exploring additional consequences of gendered language. Understanding the range of processes affected is of particular importance when evaluating real-world policies. Yale University recently changed the title of a leadership role from master to head. The present study (N = 341) investigated what exemplars come to mind (i.e., cognitive accessibility) while also probing memory for women and men in the leadership role both before and after Yale's language policy change. Students exposed to master generated a male exemplar more than would be expected by the incidence of men and recognized actual men in the role more accurately (d') than women in a face recognition task. Among students exposed to head, both biases were eliminated. The previous literature shows that masculine generic language brings men to mind. The present work demonstrates a similar effect but in an applied context while further documenting consequences for memory. Gender inclusive language polices have potential to reduce gender biased thinking with applied significance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Concern that masculine generic language (e.g., man to mean humanity) perpetuates gender inequity has led several institutions to formally discourage its use. While previous experimental research indicates that generic terms like man bring more exemplars of men than women to mind, only recently have researchers begun exploring additional consequences of gendered language. Understanding the range of processes affected is of particular importance when evaluating real-world policies. Yale University recently changed the title of a leadership role from master to head. The present study (N=341) investigated what exemplars come to mind (i.e., cognitive accessibility) while also probing memory for women and men in the leadership role both before and after Yale’s language policy change. Students exposed to master generated a male exemplar more than would be expected by the incidence of men and recognized actual men than women in the role more accurately (d’) in a face recognition task. Among students exposed to head, both biases were eliminated. The previous literature shows that masculine generic language brings men to mind. The present work demonstrates a similar effect but in an applied context while further documenting consequences for memory. Gender-inclusive language polices have potential to reduce gender biased thinking with applied significance.

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.

Physical postures can instill a sense of power in the self as well as communicate power to others. Recent work indicates that a target’s gender interferes with the rapid identification of power pos...

Some have described gay and lesbian people as making a “lifestyle choice” while others assert that bisexuality is not a stable or valid identity. This paper examines the possibility that perceived instability and perceived choice, and their associations with prejudice, differ depending on both the sexual orientation of the participant and the target group. Participants varying in sexual orientation were randomly assigned to evaluate heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual targets. Results indicated that negative evaluation of the various target groups was more closely associated with perceived instability than it was with perceived choice. This relationship was moderated by both participant and target sexual orientation; for example, it was weaker for bisexual targets, whose sexual orientations were rated as unstable even among nonbisexual participants who evaluated them positively. A more nuanced understanding of the beliefs underlying prejudice against sexual minorities can be developed by considering targets and participants of many sexual orientations.

People view men as typically human, although some conditions may make this more or less likely. Language has been implicated as one factor, with masculine generic language (e.g., he used neutrally) leading to more androcentrism relative to its alternatives. However, the influence of two types of alternatives (e.g., they vs. he or she) remains unclear. The present study asked 297 male and female online participants from the United States to select typical representations of humanity from a set of White and Black male and female faces. The wording for the concept humanity was manipulated to be either a typical member of mankind, a typical human, or a typical man or woman (or woman or man). Overall, participants selected more White targets. Participants also selected more male targets, but the degree to which that was the case was affected by wording and participant’s gender. Participants, particularly male participants, in the mankind and human wording conditions were more likely to select a male target as representative, whereas in the man or woman condition, participants’ choices did not differ from chance. Thus, androcentric thinking may be more mutable than previously surmised, varying by participants’ gender and by context.

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.

Objective Accurate assessment of pain is central to diagnosis and treatment in healthcare, especially in pediatrics. However, few studies have examined potential biases in adult observer ratings of children's pain. Cohen, Cobb, & Martin (2014. Gender biases in adult ratings of pediatric pain. Children's Health Care, 43, 87-95) reported that adult participants rated a child undergoing a medical procedure as feeling more pain when the child was described as a boy as compared to a girl, suggesting a possible gender bias. To confirm, clarify, and extend this finding, we conducted a replication experiment and follow-up study examining the role of explicit gender stereotypes in shaping such asymmetric judgments. Methods In an independent, pre-registered, direct replication and extension study with open data and materials (https://osf.io/t73c4/), we showed participants the same video from Cohen et al. (2014), with the child described as a boy or a girl depending on condition. We then asked adults to rate how much pain the child experienced and displayed, how typical the child was in these respects, and how much they agreed with explicit gender stereotypes concerning pain response in boys versus girls. Results Similar to Cohen et al. (2014), but with a larger and more demographically diverse sample, we found that the "boy" was rated as experiencing more pain than the "girl" despite identical clinical circumstances and identical pain behavior across conditions. Controlling for explicit gender stereotypes eliminated the effect. Conclusions Explicit gender stereotypes-for example, that boys are more stoic or girls are more emotive-may bias adult assessment of children's pain.

Bisexual people are often implored to "pick a side," implying that bisexuality is both more controllable and less desirable than heterosexuality or homosexuality. Bisexual people's status as a social group perceived to fall between a traditionally advantaged group and a traditionally disadvantaged group may have the potential to clarify lay conceptions of sexual orientation. We examined participants' views of groups varying in sexual orientation by randomly assigning participants (including heterosexual men and women as well as gay men and lesbian women) from four samples to evaluate heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual targets (N = 1379). Results provided strong evidence for the previously untested theoretical argument that bisexuality is perceived as less stable than heterosexuality or homosexuality. In addition, participants low in Personal Need for Structure rated female (but not male) bisexuality as relatively stable, suggesting that a preference for simple, binary thinking can partially explain a negative conception of an ostensibly "intermediate" identity. Bisexual targets were perceived as falling between heterosexual and homosexual targets in terms of gender nonconformity, and less decisive, less monogamous, and lacking in positive traits that were associated with homosexual targets. In sum, views of bisexual people were both more negative than and qualitatively different from views of gay men and lesbian women. We discuss the results as an illustration of the complex ways that perceivers' attitudes can differ depending on which target groups they are considering, suggesting that intergroup bias cannot be fully understood without attending to social categories viewed as intermediate.

As editors, reviewers, and authors, we are very pleased with the output of this Special Issue. We received a robust number of interesting and diverse submissions, and we were very lucky to convince...

Beliefs about who typically expresses which emotions are deeply ingrained and likely affect how people perceive and respond to emotional displays by others. We examined how emotional expressions and social status separately and in combination affect how quickly participants can categorize faces by their gender. The speed with which people categorize targets is informative about what combinations are expected or not. In Study 1, participants categorized the gender of targets displaying angry, happy, and neutral expressions. Response times were slower to incongruent gender-emotion pairs (angry female faces, happy male faces) relative to both neutral and congruent expressions. In Study 2, participants again categorized the gender of targets, this time presented as having high or low status. Target status affected response times to female targets only. Female targets were categorized more slowly when they both had high status and expressed anger (vs. happiness or no emotion). No differences by emotion were found for low-status female targets. In sum, anger was incongruent with women at an automatic level both when they had high status and when their status was unmarked, whereas explicit low-status information eliminated this incongruity. These data confirm the existence of deeply-ingrained associations linking status, gender, and emotion and underscore the importance of emotional expression and status in how women are perceived.

This commentary makes three points: (1) the existing evidence does not consistently favor the proposed sex difference in attractiveness preferences, nor the fitness-related outcomes of attractiveness; (2) the neglected association of perceived attractiveness and trustworthiness allowed the authors to incorrectly attribute many findings solely to attractiveness, and (3) the importance accorded attractiveness in mate preferences is culturally shaped and likely evolutionarily novel.

There exists a stereotype that women are more expressive than men; however, research has almost exclusively focused on a single facial behavior, smiling. A large-scale study examines whether women are consistently more expressive than men or whether the effects are dependent on the emotion expressed. Studies of gender differences in expressivity have been somewhat restricted to data collected in lab settings or which required labor-intensive manual coding. In the present study, we analyze gender differences in facial behaviors as over 2,000 viewers watch a set of video advertisements in their home environments. The facial responses were recorded using participants' own webcams. Using a new automated facial coding technology we coded facial activity. We find that women are not universally more expressive across all facial actions. Nor are they more expressive in all positive valence actions and less expressive in all negative valence actions. It appears that generally women express actions more frequently than men, and in particular express more positive valence actions. However, expressiveness is not greater in women for all negative valence actions and is dependent on the discrete emotional state.

Research on the interaction of emotional expressions with social category cues in face processing has focused on whether specific emotions are associated with single-category identities, thus overlooking the influence of intersectional identities. Instead, we examined how quickly people categorise intersectional targets by their race, gender, or emotional expression. In Experiment 1, participants categorised Black and White faces displaying angry, happy, or neutral expressions by either race or gender. Emotion influenced responses to men versus women only when gender was made salient by the task. Similarly, emotion influenced responses to Black versus White targets only when participants categorised by race. In Experiment 2, participants categorised faces by emotion so that neither category was more salient. As predicted, responses to Black women differed from those to both Black men and White women. Thus, examining race and gender separately is insufficient to understanding how emotion and social category cues are processed.

Although the negative psychological impact of self-objectification is well-documented, whether people generally recognize this impact in other people remains unclear. We hypothesized that due to their relatively limited experience with self-objectification, men are less likely than women to perceive its ramifications. In Study 1a, where 132 U.S. undergraduates were induced to perceive a female target as self-objectifying, women saw more negative emotions in her. Study 1b, using a U.S. online sample (N = 170), indicated that this difference was not due to participants’ own state of self-objectification. In Study 2, when participants (U.S. online sample, N = 84) identified with objectified targets, women again reported stronger negative reactions, further supporting our hypothesis. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Although we now know about the long-term consequences of moderate to severe sexual harassment, little is known about the immediate effects of more subtle harassment. The present study was designed to examine real-time consequences of subtle sexual harassment in a job interview using objective indicators of job performance. Fifty women were recruited for a job interview. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two interview conditions during which they were asked either three sexual or non-sexual questions interspersed with standard interview questions. In the former, women applicants spoke less fluently, gave lower quality answers, and asked fewer job relevant questions than did those in the non-sexual interview. It thus appears that even relatively mild harassment disrupts immediate performance.

Correlates and consequences of newspaper accounts of research on sex differences were examined. In Study 1, articles from high-circulation newspapers were coded for the degree to which biological factors were used to explain sex differences. Results showed that political conservatism and traditional attitudes toward gender roles coded from other newspaper sections predicted greater use of biological explanations than did political liberalism and less traditional attitudes toward gender roles. In Studies 2 and 3, participants read a fictional newspaper article reporting research on a gender difference that cited either biological or sociocultural factors as explaining the difference. Results showed that exposure to biological explanations significantly increased participants' endorsement of gender stereotypes. Moreover, exposure to social explanations significantly increased participants' belief in the mutability of human behavior. Together, these studies show that political ideology influences how the popular press reports research findings and that such reporting in turn affects readers' beliefs and attitudes.

To evaluate the effects of self-objectification on mood, motivation, and cognitive performance, 80 women either tried on a swimsuit (high objectification) or a sweater (low objectification). In addition, in order to investigate whether “fat talk” exacerbates the negative effects of self-objectification, half of each group overheard a confederate make self-disparaging body comments or neutral comments. Self-objectification, either as an individual difference disposition (trait) or as a situationally induced state, was associated with increased negative feelings, decreased intrinsic motivation, lower self-efficacy, and diminished cognitive functioning. The “fat talk” prime had mixed effects; potential reasons are discussed in detail. Exposure to fat talk was associated with an increase in negative emotion for women in sweaters, but a decrease in negative emotion for women in swimsuits. Fat talk was also associated with improved motivation and cognitive functioning for women low in trait self-objectification but diminished motivation and performance for women high in trait self-objectification.

In this article we examine gender differences in nonverbal expressiveness, with a particular focus on crying and smiling. We show that women cry and smile more as well as show more facial expressiveness in general, but that the size of this gender difference varies with the social and emotional context. We interpret this variation within a contextual framework (see also Brody & Hall, 2008; Deaux & Major, 1987; LaFrance, Hecht, & Paluck, 2003). More specifically, we distinguish three factors that predict the size of gender differences in emotional expressiveness: gender-specific norms, social role and situational constraints, and emotional intensity. These factors interact in different ways for smiling and crying.

Sexual harassment studies that use hypothetical situations and retrospective surveys may overestimate the degree to which victims actually confront their harassers. The result is that immediate emotional reactions are little understood and victims are often taken to task for nonconfrontational behavior. To address this neglect, we describe our experimental investigation of immediate reactions to sexually harassing questions encountered during a realistic job interview. Behavioral and emotional responses are compared to those in an imagined harassing interview. Results indicate that interviewees who are actually harassed react very differently than those who only imagine their responses. For example, imagined victims anticipate feeling angry but actual targets report being afraid. Anticipated behavior also did not mesh with actual behavior. Implications of these discrepancies for perceptions of “correct” ways to respond to harassment are examined.

This experiment tested whether social power and sex affect amount and type of smiling. Participants were assigned to low-, high-, or equal-power positions and interacted in dyads. For high- and equal-power participants, smiling correlated with positive affect, whereas for low- power participants, it did not. Women smiled more than men overall and showed more Duchenne smiling in the equal-power context, but they did not differ in the high-power context or low-power context. Results are interpreted as reflecting the license given to high-power people to smile when they are so inclined and the obligation for low-power people to smile regardless of how positive they feel.

The present studies are the first in which social psychological methods were used to test the popular claim that the experience of concealing a stigmatized social identity leads to a "divided self." For people with concealable stigmas, concealment in public settings makes the public-private dimension of self-expression particularly salient, leading them to organize self-relevant information along this dimension. The result is a strengthened cognitive distinction between public and private aspects of the self, what we have termed public-private schematization. We developed and tested a measure of the cognitive accessibility of the distinction between public and private self-schemas by measuring how quickly participants sorted trait attributes into self-in-public (e.g., self-at-work) and self-in-private (e.g., self-at-home). People with more accessible distinct public and private self-schemas should be faster at categorizing trait attributes into public- and private-self aspects than those with more integrated public and private self-schemas. Relative to people without such identities, people with concealable stigmas (Study 1a, sexual orientation; Study 1b, religiosity at a secular college), show greater public-private schematization. This schematization is linked to concealment (Study 2) and to the experimental activation of concealable versus conspicuous stigmatized identities (Study 3). Implications of distinct public and private self-schemas for psychological well-being are explored in Studies 4 and 5. Two different measures of distress-perceived social stress (Study 4) and depressive symptoms (Study 5)-provided evidence showing that the accessibility of the distinction between public and private self-schemas accounted for the association of concealment on heightened distress. Implications for research on concealment and self-structure are discussed.

This study examined how tone of voice related to directory assistance operators' s]peed at handling customer calls. Brief (5-s) audio exerpts of telephone operator conversation were presented to judges who rated these on 5 personality dimensions and 5 vocal qualities. When these measures were correlated with a key measure of job performance, namely call duration, results showed that operators who were faster at handling calls were rated as significantly more enthusiastic, sympathetic, confident, professional, and friendly (average r= -.56). The voices of faster operators were also rated as significantly more changing (vs. monotonous) and as containing clearer (vs. slurred) pronunciation. Results are discussed in terms of the role that tone of voice plays in telephone operator-customer interaction, and telephone interactions more generally.

The authors investigated the social significance of human smiles, specifically the penchant for transgressors who smile to be judged more leniently than those who do not. Of particular interest was whether different types of smiles generate different degrees of leniency and what mediated the effect. Subjects judged a case of possible academic misconduct. Materials included a photograph of a female target displaying a neutral expression, felt smile, false smile, or miserable smile. Smiling targets received more leniency than nonsmiling targets, although they were not seen as less guilty. The type of smile did not significantly moderate the amount of leniency shown. Of the variables evaluated for mediating the smile-leniency effect, such as perceiving the target as more likable, submissive, or diplomatic, the one that best accounted for the effect was perceiving the target as a trustworthy person. The implication seems to be—if in trouble, smile.