Gender as Embedded Social Cognition

Abstract

We examine gender as a cultural construct enacted through social cognitive processes that are embedded within the self, social interactions, and societal institutions. The embeddedness perspective elaborates how the binary gender categorization can create quite real gendered outcomes and experiences even if gender differences are not biologically essential. These categories take on a reality outside of the mind of perceivers because the meanings attached to gender categories are shared by others in the culture, enacted in social interactions, internalized into self-views, and maintained by social systems. Societal institutions explicitly and implicitly organize around gender, producing gendered norms, roles, and expectations. These norms, roles, and expectations shape the nature of interpersonal interactions both within and across gender lines and an individual’s self-selected experiences. Critically, these social interactions and personal choices in turn create behavioral and cognitive confirmation of the gendered expectations of others. Gendered expectations and experiences become internalized into the self, including one’s own self-concept and gender identity. We close by examining implications of this perspective for gender differences and similarities in social cognition, as well as malleability and stability in gender cognitions and outcomes.

What does it mean to be (seen as) human? The importance of gender in humanization.

“…In its absence, people report a more difficult sensemaking process, which in turn predicts diminished ratings of humanness (see Studies 6 and 7). And while our effect appears to be rooted in a basic cognitive process, it is certainly possible that the relationship between personhood and gender is reified and reinforced via interpersonal and societal forces (Diekman & Schmader, 2021).…”

“…Our work calls for more research to connect and bridge gender literature across disciplines. As recent work has argued, gender is an elaborate schema that not only exists at a psychological level but is created and reinforced at a societal, institutional, and cultural one, as well (Diekman & Schmader, 2021; Martin & Slepian, 2020). Psychology is particularly well positioned to answer questions and test hypotheses posited in other disciplines and domains.…”

“…We suggest gender’s importance in reproduction and survival, as well as the interpersonal and cultural pressures that reinforce gender in cognition, render it a defining feature of people’s notion of personhood. As we will review, social cognition purportedly evolved to help the human species rapidly differentiate biological sex (Buss, 1995, 2015), but everyday experience in social interactions and social systems reinforce sex-differentiation, creating a culturally constructed, binary notion of gender that structures and guides how we see ourselves and others (see Diekman & Schmader, 2021). Thus, we begin from an evolutionary perspective, zooming out to consider the role that gender 1 has played in the course of human history, and then move toward a social and cultural perspective on how gender is created and reinforced in the modern day.…”

“…These differences are internalized, spawning a gender identity that typically, but need not, take a binary (male, female) form. Even those who identify as nonbinary or gender fluid are expected to conform to binary gender roles—gender takes on a reality outside individuals, being reproduced at institutional, interpersonal, societal, and cultural levels (Diekman & Schmader, 2021; Martin & Slepian, 2020).…”

“…Although having a sex is certainly not sufficient to prompt the granting of “mind” to targets—it is not uniquely human—gender (the cultural attributes we impose upon biological sex) has been argued to be a defining feature of human life (Butler, 1990; Nussbaum, 1999). As reviewed above, gender is a cognitive backdrop that people use to structure their social world and is reinforced at multiple levels: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and societal (Diekman & Schmader, 2021), and as such, is likely implicated in “seeing human.” Indeed, many of the physical and psychological features of targets (e.g., appearance, movement, personality), as well as the desires and motives of perceivers (e.g., understand, connect, control), operate through a gendered lens. We investigate the special role gender plays in seeing human by examining whether (a) ascribing something with mind leads to attributing it a gender (more so than other social categories) and (b) stripping an entity of gender leads to seeing it as less human.…”