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We are investigating the effects of positive vs. negative media representation of trans and gender diverse people on attitudes about them.

We are investigating the effects of positive vs. negative media representation of trans and gender diverse people on attitudes about them. Participants will be randomly assigned to one of the 3 experimental conditions (positive, negative, control) and then complete scales measuring attitudes towards trans and gender diverse people. Further constructs will be measured to check for mediators and moderators (e.g., gender binary beliefs, identity centrality, etc.).

Previous research has revealed that the gendered division of labor in the household leads to gender-stereotypical associations with female and male parents - people associate mothers more strongly with communal traits (e.g., affectionate, helpful, warm) and behaviors (e.g., comforting a child), and fathers more strongly with agentic traits (e.g., assertive, decisive, independent) and behaviors (e.g., providing the household income; Banchefsky & Park, 2015; Park, Smith & Correll, 2010). To refer to a person in a parental role, people can use the gender-specific nouns “mother” and “father”, or the generic noun “parent” which does not indicate the gender of the referent. So far, parental stereotypes have been investigated only for the gender-specific parental roles of “mother” and “father”. This study aims to investigate how language can reduce gender stereotyping of the parental role by comparing the generic role noun (“parent”) to gender-specific role nouns (“mother” and “father”). More specifically, this research examines whether people ascribe different traits to the generic role “parent” in comparison to the gender-specific roles “mother” and “father”. The current study is the first one to investigate the impact of language on the content of parental stereotypes. It also extends previous research by examining the different facets of agency and communion in the social perception of parental roles.

This study investigates people's gender stereotypes about parental roles by comparing people’s ascriptions of communion and agency to “mother/s”, “father/s”, and “parent/s”. To address a person in a parental role, people can use either the gender-specific role nouns “mother” and “father” or the gender-unspecific role noun “parent”. However, to date the stereotyping of parents has been investigated only for gender-specific parental role nouns like mothers and fathers (e.g., Banchefsky & Park, 2015; Ross-Plourde et al., 2023). Thus, it remains an open question how people perceive “parent/s” in general and whether the gender-unspecific role noun can evoke different trait ascriptions compared to "mother/s" and "father/s". Previous research has shown that people associate mothers more strongly with communal traits (e.g., affectionate, helpful, warm) and behaviors (e.g., arranging for a babysitter), and fathers more strongly with agentic traits (e.g., assertive, decisive, independent) and behaviors (e.g., providing the household income; Banchefsky & Park, 2015; Park, Smith & Correll, 2010). As parents comprise both mothers and fathers, people’s stereotypes of parents, in general, should be less gendered. Accordingly, the gender-unspecific role noun “parent/s” likely reduces gender stereotypical trait ascriptions.

To attract and retain a more diverse workforce, organisations include diversity statements on their websites. These diversity statements signal an organisation’s commitment to diversity (McNab & Johnston, 2002) and that the workplace is inclusive and fair to members of different groups (Dover et al., 2020). In their statements or on the webpages dedicated to diversity and inclusion, organisations often mention several group categories as examples for diversity (e.g., gender, sexuality, age). Although organisations mention categories, they tend not to say anything about their intersections (Krivoshchekov et. al., manuscript under review), thus operating under the assumption that “one size fits all.” Such an approach does not take into account that people’s workplace and diversity initiatives experiences are influenced by their intersecting identities (Opara et al., 2020; Wong et al., 2022). Critically, mentioning separate categories might not support diversity within individuals because people tend to think of prototypical members when presented with a group category (Bailey et al., 2019; Sternberg et al., 2023). Using single separate categories in diversity statements raises a question about who comes to people’s mind when they read organisational diversity statements. A tendency to refer to a single category alters one’s perception of a group by making certain members a category default. For instance, in the Western culture, the category ‘people’ was mostly found to be defaulted to male (Bailey et al., 2022), White (Devos & Banaji, 2005; Hegarty & Buechel, 2006), straight (Hegarty et al., 2004; Lick & Johnson, 2016), and young (North & Fiske, 2015). As a result, some intersecting categories are less accessible and overlooked when processing the larger category (Carnaghi et al., 2022; Coladonato et al., 2022; Klysing, 2023; Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008; Schug et al., 2015; Sternberg et al., 2023; Thomas et al., 2014). Thus, when organisations produce diversity statements, they might try to break the cognitive accessibility of single typical categories (i.e., White, young, straight, male), and therefore they create diversity statements in which they try to make people think of other (i.e., atypical) categories. Importantly, the accessibility of categories can be affected by the context (Bailey et al., 2019). Because diversity statements are designed to attract candidates from underrepresented groups (Dover et al., 2020) and therefore mention them frequently in their diversity initiatives, recipients’ accessible categories should be categories that are otherwise atypical, namely, those oppositional to the category defaults. For instance, in a diversity statement, gender is anticipated to make “women” more accessible than “men,” race/ethnicity is anticipated to make “Black” more accessible than “White.” This is because groups that are more frequently instantiated tend to come to the perceivers’ mind first (Bailey et al., 2019; Barsalou, 1985). To examine this, we will ask participants to read a diversity statement, then we will present them with pictures of people that represent different intersections and ask them to rank pictures in the order from who they think is being referred to the most at the top to being referred to the least at the bottom. Therefore, we hypothesise that participants will rank members of atypical single categories higher than members of typical single categories after reading a diversity statement (hypothesis 1). For example, people will rank women higher than men, Black people higher than White people, adults higher than young. Nevertheless, organisations run into a risk that, instead of breaking the accessibility of typical categories, they produce a different set of typical categories (i.e., category defaults) that will be more accessible, including those with only single atypical category (e.g., women) but neglecting others with multiple atypical categories (e.g., Black elderly women). For instance, when reading a diversity statement, one might think of an elderly Black woman or an elderly (White male) person. If one social category is made accessible, perceivers risk using that category over alternatives and keep other ones as defaults (i.e., a woman but young), which are usually more accessible. We argue that a diversity statement without any references to intersectionality is not enough to make the intersectionality of multiple atypical categories highly accessible, which is vital for diversity initiatives (see Opara et al., 2020; Wong et al., 2022). At the same time, the way information is presented (i.e., framing) might facilitate the accessibility of intersectional categories among readers. For instance, compared to framing “gender as binary”, “gender as diverse or irrelevant” increased perceived gender diversity in the organisation (Klysing et al., 2022). As such, we predict that when presented with pictures of people with different intersections participants will rank people with multiple atypical categories higher (more at the top) than people with single atypical categories after reading a diversity statement that refers to intersectionality than after a diversity statement that does not mention intersectionality (hypothesis 2). Finally, we will explore which categories participants tend to mention after reading a diversity statement and whether participants will more frequently mention multiple intersectional atypical categories after reading a diversity statement that refers to intersectionality than after a diversity statement that does not mention intersectionality. Further, we are interested in the order of the mentioned categories. In the case of diversity initiatives, there are certain groups that people tend to associate with organisational diversity initiatives. For example, despite gender (as a whole) being the most frequently mentioned category in diversity statements across European organisations (Krivoshchekov et. al., manuscript under review), diversity initiatives are usually designed to support women but not non-binary individuals (see e.g., Dover et al., 2020). As such, some groups will be more likely to be mentioned first. Therefore, we will explore the order in which participants will mention group categories.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-jcc-10.1177_0022022121997997 for Psychometric Properties and Correlates of Precarious Manhood Beliefs in 62 Nations by Jennifer K. Bosson, Paweł Jurek, Joseph A. Vandello, Natasza Kosakowska-Berezecka, Michał Olech, Tomasz Besta, Michael Bender, Vera Hoorens, Maja Becker, A. Timur Sevincer, Deborah L. Best, Saba Safdar, Anna Włodarczyk, Magdalena Zawisza, Magdalena Żadkowska, Sami Abuhamdeh, Collins Badu Agyemang, Gülçin Akbaş, Nihan Albayrak-Aydemir, Soline Ammirati, Joel Anderson, Gulnaz Anjum, Amarina Ariyanto, John Jamir Benzon R. Aruta, Mujeeba Ashraf, Aistė Bakaitytė, Chiara Bertolli, Dashamir Bërxulli, Chongzeng Bi, Katharina Block, Mandy Boehnke, Renata Bongiorno, Janine Bosak, Annalisa Casini, Qingwei Chen, Peilian Chi, Vera Cubela Adoric, Serena Daalmans, Justine Dandy, Soledad de Lemus, Sandesh Dhakal, Nikolay Dvorianchikov, Sonoko Egami, Edgardo Etchezahar, Carla Sofia Esteves, Neto Felix, Laura Froehlich, Efrain Garcia-Sanchez, Alin Gavreliuc, Dana Gavreliuc, Ángel Gomez, Francesca Guizzo, Sylvie Graf, Hedy Greijdanus, Ani Grigoryan, Joanna Grzymała-Moszczyńska, Keltouma Guerch, Marie Gustafsson Sendén, Miriam-Linnea Hale, Hannah Hämer, Mika Hirai, Lam Hoang Duc, Martina Hřebíčková, Paul B. Hutchings, Dorthe Høj Jensen, Inga Jasinskaja-Lahti, Serdar Karabati, Kaltrina Kelmendi, Gabriella Kengyel, Narine Khachatryan, Rawan Ghazzawi, Mary Kinahan, Teri A. Kirby, Monika Kovács, Desiree Kozlowski, Vladislav Krivoshchekov, Clara Kulich, Tai Kurosawa, Nhan Thi Lac An, Javier Labarthe, Ioana Latu, Mary Anne Lauri, Eric Mankowski, Abiodun Musbau Lawal, Junyi Li, Jana Lindner, Anna Lindqvist, Angela T. Maitner, Elena Makarova, Ana Makashvili, Shera Malayeri, Sadia Malik, Tiziana Mancini, Claudia Manzi, Silvia Mari, Sarah E. Martiny, Claude-Hélène Mayer, Vladimir Mihić, Jasna Milošević Đorđević, Eva Moreno-Bella, Silvia Moscatelli, Andrew Bryan Moynihan, Dominique Muller, Erita Narhetali, Félix Neto, Kimberly A. Noels, Boglárka Nyúl, Emma C. O’Connor, Danielle P. Ochoa, Sachiko Ohno, Sulaiman Olanrewaju Adebayo, Randall Osborne, Maria Giuseppina Pacilli, Jorge Palacio, Snigdha Patnaik, Vassilis Pavlopoulos, Pablo Pérez de León, Ivana Piterová, Juliana Barreiros Porto, Angelica Puzio, Joanna Pyrkosz-Pacyna, Erico Rentería Pérez, Emma Renström, Tiphaine Rousseaux, Michelle K. Ryan, Mario Sainz, Marco Salvati, Adil Samekin, Simon Schindler, Masoumeh Seydi, Debra Shepherd, Sara Sherbaji, Toni Schmader, Cláudia Simão, Rosita Sobhie, Lucille De Souza, Emma Sarter, Dijana Sulejmanović, Katie E. Sullivan, Mariko Tatsumi, Lucy Tavitian-Elmadjian, Suparna Jain Thakur, Quang Thi Mong Chi, Beatriz Torre, Ana Torres, Claudio V. Torres, Beril Türkoğlu, Joaquín Ungaretti, Timothy Valshtein, Colette Van Laar, Jolanda van der Noll, Vadym Vasiutynskyi, Christin-Melanie Vauclair, Satu Venäläinen, Neharika Vohra, Marta Walentynowicz, Colleen Ward, Yaping Yang, Vincent Yzerbyt, Valeska Zanello, Antonella Ludmila Zapata-Calvente and Rita Žukauskienė in Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

The ESM provides the descriptive statistics of the variables collected in the three studies