Seeing men everywhere, even in toast

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2022.02.008

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Volume 26, Issue 5, May 2022, Pages 365-367

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.02.008 Get rights and content

Women and men each represent about half the population, but people think of the concept person more as a man. Wardle et al. recently found that people also see face-like objects more as men than as women. This finding generates further questions on whether bias about concepts and faces might differ.

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There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (5)

Children perceive illusory faces in objects as male more often than female
2023, Cognition
Face pareidolia is the experience of seeing illusory faces in inanimate objects. While children experience face pareidolia, it is unknown whether they perceive gender in illusory faces, as their face evaluation system is still developing in the first decade of life. In a sample of 412 children and adults from 4 to 80 years of age we found that like adults, children perceived many illusory faces in objects to have a gender and had a strong bias to see them as male rather than female, regardless of their own gender identification. These results provide evidence that the male bias for face pareidolia emerges early in life, even before the ability to discriminate gender from facial cues alone is fully developed. Further, the existence of a male bias in children suggests that any social context that elicits the cognitive bias to see faces as male has remained relatively consistent across generations.
Children can represent complex social status hierarchies: Evidence from Indonesia
2023, Child Development
Investigation of gender bias in the mental imagery of faces
2023, Group Processes and Intergroup Relations
Face pareidolia in male schizophrenia
2022, Schizophrenia
Gender Relativism: How Context Shapes What Is Seen as Male and Female
2022, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

²: Website: aprilhbailey.com

^@: Twitter: @ahbailey04

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Trends in Cognitive Sciences

SpotlightSeeing men everywhere, even in toast

J. Exp. Soc. Psychol.

Illusory faces are more likely to be perceived as male than female

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A.

Are stereotypes of nationalities applied to both women and men?

J. Pers. Soc. Psychol.

An intersectional analysis of gender and ethnic stereotypes: Testing three hypotheses

Psychol. Women Q.

Boys write about boys: Androcentrism in children’s reading experience and its emergence in children’s own writing

Child Dev.

Spotlight
Seeing men everywhere, even in toast