Agency Bias Research Articles

Gender bias in movie posters through the lens of Spatial Agency Bias

Research has shown that women are perceived as having less agency than men. Numerous studies have found portrayals of gender inequality in different aspects of media, including movie posters. However, no study has examined movie posters to assess portrayals of agency between genders. This study attempts to fill the literature gap by examining the top 250 grossing movie posters of all time in the US through the lens of Spatial Agency Bias to determine if there are differences in portrayed agency based on one’s gender in movie posters. The two levels of the independent variable – gender – are female and male, and the two levels of the dependent variable – spatial positioning – are left and right. A chi-squared test of independence was utilized to determine whether there were statistically significant levels of gender stereotyping in movie posters with regard to agency. The study found that women are portrayed in positions of less agency compared to men on movie posters. The implications of this study are gender inequality in various contexts through the unfavorable stereotyping of women relative to men in their perceived levels of agency. Although the causes of this discrepancy were outside the scope of this study, potential causes, implications, solutions, and future directions are discussed.

Flipping the Political Scale

This article investigates spatial representations of the political system in Swedish civics textbooks, 1900–2020. It challenges common assumptions about the spatiality of politics, such as the analogy between parties representing the upper classes and the right. Instead, the investigation reveals a complicated history, which includes a sudden shift in polarity of the political spectrum in the 1980s. Then, the political right finally moved to the spatial right in diagrams of the political system, after having been placed to the left for most of the 20th century. The article also discusses how diagrammatic representations of the party system changed in the 2010s, as democracy was perceived to be under threat and new dimensions emerged in politics. These puzzling empirical findings are analyzed with the help of theories on spatial and diagrammatic cognition, such as primary metaphors and spatial agency bias.

When spatial agency bias and the advantage of the first mention are in contradiction: Evidence from Czech, German, and Spanish

Evidence from Art (History), perceptual psychology, and (psycho-)linguistics support the claim that in Western culture (or rather within left-to-right writing languages), people depict or visualize more important or salient figures to the left. However, linguistics studies investigating this topic almost exclusively use active sentences with standard Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) syntax as stimuli, where the subject takes the role of an agent. However natural language exhibits much more syntactical variation. To determine if this pattern is also present when the less common syntax is used, we asked native German, Spanish, and Czech speakers (N=300) to draw situations representing ten sentences varying in syntactic structure. These drawings, simplified versions of the mental representation of the situation, provide a glimpse into the conceptualization of the scenes. The spatial placement of the agent figures in the sentences was coded. Results show that although the asymmetrical effect is strong in prototypical SVO sentences, where the subject has the function of an agent and the object a function of a patient, the effect is weaker or disappears in passive sentences, where the subject at the first position is a patient and object on the second position is an agent, as well as in topicalized (OVS) sentences. Furthermore, we found cross-linguistic differences, which suggests that the character of the bias is language-specific. We postulate that placing the agent to the left is only one of the factors influencing spatial placement. The other factor playing an important role is the naming order.

The Agency Bias in Creativity Evaluations: The Role of Implicit Beliefs about Creativity

Although past research has suggested that older workers are stereotyped as less creative, little is known about mechanisms that underlie this belief and the conditions under which this bias is likely to occur. Past research suggests that people construe creative individuals as highly agentic individuals who can produce radically different creative ideas. We suggest that these implicit beliefs about creativity would disadvantage creative evaluations of older workers as they are often perceived lacking in agency. Four studies, including experimental and archival data from Fortune 500 employees and M.B.A students, support our predictions. Study 1 analyzed archival data from M.B.A. students, finding that older targets were perceived as less innovative. Utilizing archival data from Fortune 500 employees, Study 2 found that older workers are evaluated as less creative; but this age bias in creativity evaluations occurred only when perceivers associate creativity with radical creativity. Study 3’s experiment found that an older target was perceived as less creative, even when described as producing identical output as a comparable younger target. Finally, Study 4’s experiment found that older targets were evaluated as less able to develop radically creative ideas because they were perceived as lacking in independent, diligent, and competent agency.

From Which Direction Does the Empire Strike (Back)?

In cultures with left-right-script, agentic behavior is mentally represented as following a left-to-right trajectory, an effect referred to as the Spatial Agency Bias (SAB, Suitner and Maass, 2016). In this research, we investigated whether spatial representations of activities are universal across activities by analyzing the opposite concepts of “attack” and “defense”. Both behaviors involve similar actions (e.g., fighting) but may differ in perceived agency. Moreover “defense” is necessarily always a response to an attack and may therefore be represented by a trajectory in the opposite direction. Two studies found the classic SAB for activities representing attacking but a reduction (Study 1) and reversal (Study 2) for activities involving defense. Although the spatial representation of defense on the right was much weaker and less unequivocal than that of attack on the left, the results suggest that the spatial representations of defense and attack are located in different positions. Apparently not all actors and all activities are spatially represented on the left with a left-to-right trajectory but position and direction depend on the perceived agency. Directions for future research and applications of our findings are discussed.

Spatial agency bias and word order flexibility: A comparison of 14 European languages

AbstractThe spatial agency bias predicts that people whose native language is rightward written will predominantly envisage action along the same direction. Two mechanisms contribute jointly to this asymmetry: (a) an embodied process related to writing/reading; (b) a linguistic regularity according to which sentence subjects (typically the agent) tend to precede objects (typically the recipient). Here we test a novel hypothesis in relation to the second mechanism, namely, that this asymmetry will be most pronounced in languages with rigid word order. A preregistered study on 14 European languages (n= 420) varying in word order flexibility confirmed a rightward bias in drawings of interactions between two people (agent and recipient). This bias was weaker in more flexible languages, confirming that embodied and linguistic features of language interact in producing it.

What is agentic about the Spatial Agency Bias? How pragmatic relevance contributes to the spatial representations of actions

AbstractThe mental imagination of (social) actions has been shown to follow a left‐to‐right trajectory, with the thematic agent associated with the left position (Spatial Agency Bias, Suitner & Maass in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 53, 2016, p. 245–301). For example, individuals asked to choose a picture that visualizes the sentence “Tom kicks George” tend to choose an image where the agent, Tom, is positioned on the left‐hand side rather than on the right‐hand side. However, as an alternative to the thematic role of the agent, such findings may reflect a mental representation following pragmatic relevance. Specifically, a pragmatic perspective holds that word order and syntactic functions are strategic devices to communicate that the element is important for the sentence. Thus, positioning in the described picture‐matching task may actually reflect the agent's pragmatic relevance instead of agency per se. As a test, we vary whether sentences are written in the active versus the passive voice. Results from five studies indicate that the passive voice results in the tendency to place the agent on the right‐hand side rather than on the left‐hand side of a picture. Instead, the acted‐upon person is positioned on the left‐hand side of a picture. A sixth experiment reveals that for the passive voice, the agent is still seen as more agentic than the receiver, but is considered less relevant. The findings are congruent with the proposed pragmatic relevance account. Implications for the Spatial Agency Bias as well as for building mental representations in general are discussed.

The Spatial Ingroup Bias: Ingroup Teams Are Positioned Where Writing Starts.

In four studies, we test the hypothesis that people, asked to envisage interactions between an ingroup and an outgroup, tend to spatially represent the ingroup where writing starts (e.g., left in Italian) and as acting along script direction. Using soccer as a highly competitive intergroup setting, in Study 1 (N = 100) Italian soccer fans were found to envisage their team on the left side of a horizontal soccer field, hence playing rightward. Studies 2a and 2b (N = 219 Italian and N = 200 English speakers) replicate this finding, regardless of whether the own team was stronger or weaker than the rival team. Study 3 (N = 67 Italian and N = 67 Arabic speakers) illustrates the cultural underpinnings of the Spatial Intergroup Bias, showing a rightward ingroup bias for Italian speakers and a leftward ingroup bias for Arabic speakers. Findings are discussed in relation to how space is deployed to symbolically express ingroup favoritism (Spatial Ingroup Bias) versus shared stereotypes (Spatial Agency Bias).

Intellectualism versus Cognitive Science of Religion

This is an analytical study into how the new cognitive science of religion (CSR) relates to the classical but now lowly regarded view of religion, according to which supernatural-agent concepts serve to explain the world. Could CSR be merely old intellectualist wine in new bottles? No, the central idea of the standard model of CSR, minimal counterintuitiveness (MCI), is not intellectualist --- yet for the phenomenon that motivates MCI theory a better account falls out of intellectualist work, five decades old, by the late anthropologist Robin Horton. Other CSR ideas include the hyperactive agency detection device (HADD), as well as two approaches that I classify as intellectualist. I argue that an agency bias is not needed to account for religion --- in fact, no type of bias is needed that could not be found in modern science as well --- and that old-fashioned intellectualism, which along the way I defend against objections, does a better job than the two CSR intellectualisms. (Although part of the CSR problem here turns out to be just odd prohibitions against the old-fashioned intellectualism.) Insight largely overlooked today, and applicable to the origin of religion and especially to the so-called Axial Age, can be found in work that is no less than three centuries old, by Bernard de Fontenelle.

Is Social Categorization Spatially Organized in a "Mental Line"? Empirical Evidences for Spatial Bias in Intergroup Differentiation.

Social categorization is the differentiation between the self and others and between one’s own group and other groups and it is such a natural and spontaneous process that often we are not aware of it. The way in which the brain organizes social categorization remains an unresolved issue. We present three experiments investigating the hypothesis that social categories are mentally ordered from left to right on an ingroup–outgroup continuum when membership is salient. To substantiate our hypothesis, we consider empirical evidence from two areas of psychology: research on differences in processing of ingroups and outgroups and research on the effects of spatial biases on processing of quantitative information (e.g., time; numbers) which appears to be arranged from left to right on a small–large continuum, an effect known as the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC). In Experiments 1 and 2 we tested the hypothesis that when membership of a social category is activated, people implicitly locate ingroup categories to the left of a mental line whereas outgroup categories are located on the far right of the same mental line. This spatial organization persists even when stimuli are presented on one of the two sides of the screen and their (explicit) position is spatially incompatible with the implicit mental spatial organization of social categories (Experiment 3). Overall the results indicate that ingroups and outgroups are processed differently. The results are discussed with respect to social categorization theory, spatial agency bias, i.e., the effect observed in Western cultures whereby the agent of an action is mentally represented on the left and the recipient on the right, and the SNARC effect.

What Extra-Pair Relationships, Disease Avoidance, Self-Esteem, Social Surrogates and the Spatial Agency Bias Have in Common: Volume 53 of the Advances in Experimental Social Psychology Series

What Extra-Pair Relationships, Disease Avoidance, Self-Esteem, Social Surrogates and the Spatial Agency Bias Have in Common: Volume 53 of the Advances in Experimental Social Psychology Series

From Spatial to Social Asymmetry

According to the spatial agency bias model, in Western cultures agentic targets are envisaged as facing and acting rightward, in line with writing direction. In four studies of Italian participants, we examined the symbolic association between agency and the rightward direction (Study 1, N = 96), its spontaneous activation when attributing agency to female and male targets (Study 2, N = 80) or when judging the authenticity of photographs of men and women (Study 3, N = 57), and its possible relation to stereotype endorsement (Study 4, N = 80). In Study 4, we used a conditioning paradigm in which participants learned a counterstereotypical new association; we developed a novel measure to assess the association between gender and spatial direction, namely, the spatial association task. Participants envisaged and cognitively processed male and female targets in line with the spatial agency bias model and reported lower benevolent sexism after learning a new counterstereotypical spatial association. Our findings raise awareness about the biased use of space (and its consequences) in the representation of women and men, so that all people, and especially communicators and policy makers, can actively intervene to promote gender equality. Additional online materials for this article are available to PWQ subscribers on PWQ’s website at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0361684316676045

Auditing, disclosure, and verification in decentralized decision problems

We study the relative performance of disclosure and auditing in decentralized institutions. We consider the information transmission problem between two decision makers who take actions in sequence at two decision dates. The first decision maker has private information about a state of nature that is relevant for both decisions, and sends a message to the second. The second decision maker can commit to only observe the message (disclosure), or can retain the option to observe the action of the first decision maker (auditing) or, at some cost, to verify the state. In equilibrium, state verification will never occur and the second decision maker effectively chooses between auditing and disclosure.When the misalignment in preferences reflects an agency bias – a bias in a decision maker's own action relative to that of the other – then the second decision maker chooses to audit in equilibrium. When the misalignment in preferences reflects an ideological bias – one decision maker prefers all actions to be biased relative to the other decision maker – then, for a large enough misalignment, the second decision maker chooses disclosure in equilibrium. Our results indicate that the ability to commit to forego the audit has value in the latter case.

Character reversal in children: the prominent role of writing direction

Recent research has established that 5- to 6-year-old typically developing children in a left–right writing culture spontaneously reverse left-oriented characters (e.g., they write instead of J) when they write single characters. Thus, children seem to implicitly apply a right-writing rule (RWR: see Fischer & Koch, 2016a). In Study 1, the reversal of all asymmetrical digits and capital letters by 356 children was modeled with a simple Rasch model, which describes reversal as the outcome of two competing responses, correct writing and writing in the cultural direction of writing. It accounts for the high frequency of reversals of the left-oriented characters (3, Z, J, 1, 2, 7, 9), as predicted by the RWR. Study 2 investigated letter reversals when children spontaneously write their name from right to left. Most of the 204 children in the study radically changed the direction of the RWR by reversing mainly the right-oriented letters (B, C, D, E, F, G, K, L, N, P, R, S). Hence, a more universal formulation of the RWR would be as an implicit rule orienting characters in the writing direction. This reformulated rule is consistent with the “spatial agency bias” model (Suitner & Maas, 2016), according to which writing direction affects thoughts and actions. Visual and motoric statistical learning may favor bootstrapping of the rule. Taken together, these data demonstrate the prominent role of culture in a phenomenon—character reversal or mirror writing—which has often been presented uniquely as biologically determined.

Violating instructed human agency: An fMRI study on ocular tracking of biological and nonbiological motion stimuli

Previous studies have shown that beliefs about the human origin of a stimulus are capable of modulating the coupling of perception and action. Such beliefs can be based on top-down recognition of the identity of an actor or bottom-up observation of the behavior of the stimulus. Instructed human agency has been shown to lead to superior tracking performance of a moving dot as compared to instructed computer agency, especially when the dot followed a biological velocity profile and thus matched the predicted movement, whereas a violation of instructed human agency by a nonbiological dot motion impaired oculomotor tracking (Zwickel et al., 2012). This suggests that the instructed agency biases the selection of predictive models on the movement trajectory of the dot motion. The aim of the present fMRI study was to examine the neural correlates of top-down and bottom-up modulations of perception–action couplings by manipulating the instructed agency (human action vs. computer-generated action) and the observable behavior of the stimulus (biological vs. nonbiological velocity profile). To this end, participants performed an oculomotor tracking task in an MRI environment. Oculomotor tracking activated areas of the eye movement network. A right-hemisphere occipito-temporal cluster comprising the motion-sensitive area V5 showed a preference for the biological as compared to the nonbiological velocity profile. Importantly, a mismatch between instructed human agency and a nonbiological velocity profile primarily activated medial–frontal areas comprising the frontal pole, the paracingulate gyrus, and the anterior cingulate gyrus, as well as the cerebellum and the supplementary eye field as part of the eye movement network. This mismatch effect was specific to the instructed human agency and did not occur in conditions with a mismatch between instructed computer agency and a biological velocity profile. Our results support the hypothesis that humans activate a specific predictive model for biological movements based on their own motor expertise. A violation of this predictive model causes costs as the movement needs to be corrected in accordance with incoming (nonbiological) sensory information.

Left-handers’ struggle in a rightward wor(l)d: The relation between horizontal spatial bias and effort in directed movements

ABSTRACTFive studies investigated the role of handedness and effort in horizontal spatial bias related to agency (Spatial Agency Bias, SAB). A Pilot Study (n = 33) confirmed the basic assumption that rightward writing requires greater effort from left- than from right-handers. In three studies, Italian students (n = 591 right-handed, n = 115 left-handed) were found to start drawings on the left, proceeding rightward (Study 1a, 1b), and to draw moving objects with a rightward orientation in line with script direction (Study 1c). These spatial asymmetries were displayed stronger by left- than by right-handed primacy school children, arguably due to the greater effort involved in learning how to write in a rightward fashion. Once writing has become fully automatic (high school) right- and left-handed students showed comparable spatial bias (Study 1c). The hypothesized role of effort was tested explicitly in Study 2 in which 99 right-handed adults learned a new (leftward) spatial trajectory through an easy or difficult motor exercise. The habitual rightward bias was reliably reduced, especially among those who performed a difficult task requiring greater effort. Together, findings are largely in line with the body specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2011) and suggest that spatial asymmetries are learned and unlearned most efficiently through effortful motor exercises.

Is the left hemisphere androcentric? Evidence of the learned categorical perception of gender

Effects of language learning on categorical perception have been detected in multiple domains. We extended the methods of these studies to gender and pitted the predictions of androcentrism theory and the spatial agency bias against each other. Androcentrism is the tendency to take men as the default gender and is socialized through language learning. The spatial agency bias is a tendency to imagine men before women in the left–right axis in the direction of one's written language. We examined how gender-ambiguous faces were categorized as female or male when presented in the left visual fields (LVFs) and right visual fields (RVFs) to 42 native speakers of English. When stimuli were presented in the RVF rather than the LVF, participants (1) applied a lower threshold to categorize stimuli as male and (2) categorized clearly male faces as male more quickly. Both findings support androcentrism theory suggesting that the left hemisphere, which is specialized for language, processes face stimuli as male-by-default more readily than the right hemisphere. Neither finding evidences an effect of writing direction predicted by the spatial agency bias on the categorization of gender-ambiguous faces.

What drives the spatial agency bias? An Italian–Malagasy–Arabic comparison study.

In Western cultures, human interactions are generally envisaged such that the agent appears on the left, the recipient on the right, with action flowing from left to right. Here we explore the joint influence of 2 mechanisms driving such spatial asymmetries: the embodiment of script direction and the order in which subject and object are mentioned. A comparison of 3 language communities (Italian, Malagasy, Arabic) differing in script direction (left-right for Italian and Malagasy and right-left for Arabic) and in subject-object order (subject-verb-object in Italian and Arabic and verb-object-subject in Malagasy) provides evidence for the assumption that both mechanisms contribute to the spatial asymmetry.

Gender Hierarchy in the Space: The Role of Gender Status in Shaping the Spatial Agency Bias

According to the Spatial Agency Bias (SAB), more agentic groups (men) are envisioned to the left of less agentic groups (women). This research investigated the role of social status in shaping the spatial representation of gender couples. Participants were presented pairs consisting of one male and one female target who confirmed gender stereotypes. The status of the targets in each pair was systematically varied (high-status vs. low-status job). Participants chose the target order (female/male vs. male/female) they preferred. In line with gender-status expectations (male: high-status, female: low-status), a male in a high-status job led to a spatial arrangement that favored the male/female order, regardless of the status of the female target. The female/male order was favored only when the female had a high-status job and the male a low-status job. No SAB occurred for pairs in which both targets displayed low-status jobs. The implications of status for the SAB are discussed.

Optimal Agency Bias and Regulatory Review

AbstractWhy do bureaucratic principals appoint agents who hold different policy views from themselves? We posit an explanation based on the interplay between two types of agency costs: shirking on information production and policy bias. Principals employ biased agents because they shirk less. This creates an incentive for the principal to use review mechanisms that mitigate the resulting bias in the agents’ decisions. The availability of such review mechanisms encourages principals to employ more extreme agents. We apply the theory to explain various features of the administrative state. In contrast to existing accounts, in our model the use by the president of ideological bureaucrats at regulatory agencies and centralized regulatory review are complements. The use of bias to mitigate shirking results in an amplification of the swings of regulatory policy and heightens the role of regulatory policy in partisan politics.