Abstract
Despite the widely documented influence of gender stereotypes on social behaviour, little is known about the electrophysiological substrates engaged in the processing of such information when conveyed by language. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we examined the brain response to third-person pronouns (lei “she” and lui “he”) that were implicitly primed by definitional (passeggera FEM “passenger”, pensionato MASC “pensioner”), or stereotypical antecedents (insegnante “teacher”, conducente “driver”). An N400-like effect on the pronoun emerged when it was preceded by a definitionally incongruent prime (passeggera FEM – lui; pensionato MASC – lei), and a stereotypically incongruent prime for masculine pronouns only (insegnante – lui). In addition, a P300-like effect was found when the pronoun was preceded by definitionally incongruent primes. However, this effect was observed for female, but not male participants. Overall, these results provide further evidence for on-line effects of stereotypical gender in language comprehension. Importantly, our results also suggest a gender stereotype asymmetry in that male and female stereotypes affected the processing of pronouns differently.
Highlights
The ways in which people acquire, store, represent and process social stereotypes is central to the domain of social cognition
Explicit vs. implicit measures of stereotyping Following Banaji and Hardin [2], we examined whether participants’ explicit gender stereotype beliefs modulated or not the gender priming effect obtained for stereotypical primes
In line with existing behavioural evidence [2,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13], our participants were faster to judge the gender of masculine and feminine pronouns when preceded by gendercongruent than gender-incongruent antecedent primes in both the definitional and stereotypical conditions
Summary
The ways in which people acquire, store, represent and process social stereotypes is central to the domain of social cognition. Social psychologists [2,3] showed that specific gender-oriented stereotypes (i.e., gender-oriented beliefs about the attributes of social groups) are associated with many English words, especially role nouns, and are automatically activated whenever such stereotyped role nouns are encountered in discourse. These effects have been replicated in psycholinguistic studies on Spanish, Italian, and German [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs), on the other hand, can more directly measure the responses that reflect cognitive and affective processes of interest to social cognition [15]
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