Humans tend to construct their world view via binaries, i.e. two distinct, non-overlapping elements, such as the juxtapositions of human-animal, human-machine or male-female. Our research focuses on the binary categories of "heterosexuality-homosexuality" and explores how stable or malleable they are. For this, we analyse newspaper coverage of sexuality concepts in the UK from 1995-2010 and quantify if and how tolerance towards ambiguous concepts including "bisexuality" vary across time as well as with gender, political opinion and expertise. Our findings indicate a distinct "millennial effect" of intolerance towards sexual ambiguity, suggesting that resistance against ambiguity rears up during periods of instability. Conversely, we found higher levels of ambiguity tolerance in left-wing newspapers, broadsheet publications, female journalists and expert writers, as opposed to right-wing newspapers, tabloid publications, male journalists and novice writers. Our results can help to better understand to what degree concepts related to human sexuality are relatively hard-wired or rather fluid social categories.

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We often pigeonhole our surroundings into dualistic categories. This capacity to function as reductionists may help us problem-solve when pressed in terms of survival or reproduction. Alternatively, binary categories may be reflective of certain socioecological conditions, and thus social constructs. This study explores classifications of nonhuman primate taxonomy via the coding of human–primate boundary categorizations during 16 years of UK newspaper reporting (1995–2010) to explore whether societal concepts of simianity reflect sociopolitical events – in other words, cultural influence resulting in ingroup boundary enforcement, with less inclusionality under more turbulent scenarios. The results indicate that societal shakiness accounts for the minimization of “human” ingroups at the expense of other primates. Human–primate infrahumanization possibly reflects a cognitive adaptation towards outgroup-directed dichotomous thinking in stress states. That said, the fluidity of the results in the context of societal change also suggests cultural influence on categorical dichotomous sets often accepted as “natural.”