Person (mis)perception: functionally biased sex categorization of bodies

Abstract

Social perception is among the most important tasks that occur in daily life, and perceivers readily appreciate the social affordances of others. Here, we demonstrate that sex categorizations are functionally biased towards a male percept. Perceivers judged body shapes that varied in waist-to-hip ratio to be men if they were not, in reality, exclusive to women, and male categorizations occurred more quickly than female categorizations (studies 1 and 4). This pattern was corroborated when participants identified the average body shapes of men and women (study 2) and when we assessed participants' cognitive representations (study 3). Moreover, these tendencies were modulated by emotion context (study 4). Thus, male categorizations occurred readily and rapidly, demonstrating a pronounced categorization bias and temporal advantage for male judgements.

Sport = Male… But Not All Sports: Investigating the Gender Stereotypes of Sport Activities at the Explicit and Implicit Levels

“…In Study 3, our results seem consistent with previous research and revealed an influence of morphology on categorization (Johnson et al 2012;Johnson and Tassinary 2005). Following our hypothesis, the prime did influence categorization in the direction of stereotypes when perceptual cues were ambiguous.…”

“…In the case of gender, the Waist-to-Hip Ratio (WHR) of a target seems to be particularly relevant to categorize individuals by gender-with hourglass figures being categorized as female and tubular figures as male (Johnson et al 2012;Johnson and Tassinary 2005). Regarding top-down influences, cues that trigger gender stereotypes may also influence the gendercategorization of a target.…”

Weight stigma is stressful. A review of evidence for the Cyclic Obesity/Weight-Based Stigma model

“…The BMI cutoff for overweight is 25, but women consider themselves overweight at approximately 23, which is well within the range for normal weight (Crawford & Campbell, 1999). Similar effects emerge among observers, who believe that the average female body is actually a thin shape that does not exist in nature (Johnson, Iida, & Tassinary, 2012). As evidenced by the study by Major and colleagues (2014), the perception of oneself as overweight is important when considering the consequences of weight stigma, and individuals who are not objectively overweight or obese may still fall prey to stigma processes.…”

A Bayesian approach to person perception

“…Bülthoff, 2012;Cellerino, Borghetti, & Sartucci, 2004) that has also been reported in chimpanzees (de Waal & Pokorny, 2008). A similar 'male bias' has also been found for body shape (Johnson, Iida, & Tassinary, 2012), hands (Gaetano, van der Zwan, Blair, & Brooks, 2014) and biological motion (Troje, Sadr, Geyer, & Nakayama, 2006). It has been suggested that, in the history of humans, misclassifying a man as female has generally proved to be potentially more dangerous than misclassifying a woman as male (Armann & Bülthoff, 2012).…”