Exploring the nature of the gender-congruency effect: implicit gender activation and social bias.
In languages with grammatical gender, such as Spanish, words with the same grammatical gender are processed with less effort (e.g., "casa" and "libreta" vs. "casa" and "cuaderno"). This phenomenon is called the gender-congruency effect and is replicated in different languages like Italian.
In this study, the authors investigated where the gender-congruency effect originates at the linguistic level. Additionally, they explored whether attitudes and social gender biases modulate this linguistic effect. For this purpose, they designed a priming task to observe if a word presented very quickly on the computer screen influenced the processing of another word presented just after. The task included different types of words with grammatical gender. Participants in the study, in addition to performing the priming task, had to answer questionnaires about their gender identity, sexist attitudes, and the use of inclusive gender forms in daily language.
The results showed that the gender-congruency effect is generated at the lexical level, as even words with arbitrary grammatical gender, such as "casa" or "cuaderno," evoke this facilitation. When analyzing the questionnaire results, it was observed that attitudes more oriented toward masculine biases, such as more sexist attitudes and attitudes against the use of inclusive language, reduced the gender-congruency effect with feminine words. This suggests that individuals with greater masculine gender biases, in general, reduce the activation of information with feminine gender, which may ultimately be associated with a dimming of the representativeness of the female figure.
In conclusion, the results obtained in this psycholinguistic study emphasize the importance of anti-sexist values education and the promotion of the use of inclusive gender forms to achieve greater visibility for women and subsequent gender equality.
Full reference: Casado A, Sá-Leite AR, Pesciarelli F, and Paolieri D (2023) Exploring the nature of the gender-congruency effect: implicit gender activation and social bias. Frontiers in Psychology. 14:1160836. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1160836
Contact Researchers:
Alba Casado, albacasado@ugr.es
Daniela Paolieri, dpaolieri@ugr.es
Ana Rita Sà-Leite, anarita.saleite.dias@usc.es
Francesca Pesciarelli, francesca.pesciarelli@unimore.it"