Abstract

Although subject-complement statements like “girls are as good as boys at math” appear to express gender equality, people infer a gender difference: the group in the complement position (boys) is judged superior. We investigated (1) whether this syntactic framing effect generalizes to other socially charged inferences and (2) whether awareness of the bias implied by the syntax mitigates its influence. Across four preregistered experiments (N = 2,734), we found reliable framing effects on inferences about both math ability and terrorist behavior, but only for the small subset of participants (∼30%) who failed to identify the influence of the subject-complement statements on their judgments. Most participants did recognize this influence, and these participants showed reduced or even reversed framing effects; they were also more likely to explicitly judge subject-complement syntax as biased. Our findings suggest that this syntax perpetuates stereotypes only when people are oblivious to, or unmotivated to interrogate, its implications.

摘要

尽管像“女孩在数学上和男孩一样好”这样的主语补语陈述似乎表达了性别平等，但人们推断出性别差异：处于补位位置的群体（男孩）被认为是优越的。我们调查了（1）这种句法框架效应是否可以推广到其他具有社会意义的推论，以及（2）对句法隐含的偏见的认识是否会减轻其影响。在四个预先注册的实验（N  = 2,734）中，我们发现了可靠的框架效应对数学能力和恐怖行为的推断，但仅限于未能确定主题补充陈述影响的一小部分参与者（~30%）关于他们的判断。大多数参与者都做到了认识到这种影响，这些参与者表现出减少甚至反转的框架效应；他们也更有可能明确判断主补语法有偏见。我们的研究结果表明，只有当人们忘记或没有动机询问其含义时，这种句法才会使刻板印象永久化。