From Spatial to Social Asymmetry

Abstract

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 ¼ 96), its spontaneous activation when attributing agency to female and male targets (Study 2, N ¼ 80) or when judging the authenticity of photographs of men and women (Study 3, N ¼ 57), and its possible relation to stereotype endorsement (Study 4, N ¼ 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.

Social Inferences From Faces as a Function of the Left-to-Right Movement Continuum

“…Right-facing targets also induce attributes of dominance, speed, temporal and ideological orientation significantly stronger than the remaining head orientations. While the specific associations between right-facing orientation and dominance attributions has long been reported (Suitner et al, 2017), the findings on temporal and ideological attributions extend the generality of the head orientation effects.…”

“…These findings constitute a preliminary yet relevant demonstration of how a particular set of social judgments, not necessarily semantically related, are tied to left-to-right distribution in written language. In addition, we build on literature showing that women and men are represented differently in the horizontal vector and capture distinct face inferences (Suitner et al, 2017). Overall, we believe this research highlights the importance of taking the target audience's script-driven asymmetry into account when representing people in space.…”

“…The asymmetrical rightward bias also facilitates gender categorization. Male faces, relative to female faces, are categorized faster when their profile is presented facing right (Suitner et al, 2017). The spatial representation of stereotypically agentic groups (e.g., males, young people) also follows the culturally determined script direction.…”

“…The aim of the study reported here was to examine the types of social inferences that are likely to be shaped by face and gaze orientation (left, frontal, right). To this end, we integrated a range of adjectives as possible inference categories that have been used: (a) in research documenting the spatial agency bias (Maass et al, 2009;Suitner et al, 2017); (b) in research showing the two-dimensional reduction from trait judgments of faces (Oosterhof and Todorov, 2008;Walker and Vetter, 2009); (c) in recent impression formation literature yielding a twodimensional solution (Fiske et al, 2007) comparable to research on trait judgments of faces; (d) in other face perception studies (Garcia-Marques et al, 2004;Langner et al, 2010;Ma et al, 2015;O'Reilly et al, 2016;Garrido et al, 2017), and finally, (e) in research showing the grounding of abstract categories of time and politics in a horizontal left-to-right dimension (Santiago et al, 2007;Lakens et al, 2011;Farias et al, 2013Farias et al, , 2016.…”

A systematic review of the ambivalent sexism literature: Hostile sexism protects men’s power; benevolent sexism guards traditional gender roles.

“…Articles classified in this domain almost exclusively used experimental designs to test interventions (e.g., J. C. Becker & Swim, 2012;Lemus et al, 2014) and, to a lesser extent, correlational designs to test factors (Cordo ´n Go ´mez et al, 2019;Gervais & Hoffman, 2013;Taschler & West, 2017) that may be useful in reducing BS (e.g., Suitner et al, 2017), HS (e.g., Zawadzki et al, 2014), or both (e.g., Yoder et al, 2016).…”