Hands as Sex Cues: Sensitivity Measures, Male Bias Measures, and Implications for Sex Perception Mechanisms

Abstract

Sex perceptions, or more particularly, sex discriminations and sex categorisations, are high-value social behaviours. They mediate almost all inter-personal interactions. The two experiments reported here had the aim of exploring some of the basic characteristics of the processes giving rise to sex perceptions. Experiment 1 confirmed that human hands can be used as a cue to an individual’s sex even when colour and texture cues are removed and presentations are brief. Experiment 1 also showed that when hands are sexually ambiguous observers tend to classify them as male more often than female. Experiment 2 showed that “male bias” arises not from sensitivity differences but from differences in response biases. Observers are conservative in their judgements of targets as female but liberal in their judgements of targets as male. These data, combined with earlier reports, suggest the existence of a sex-perception space that is cue-invariant.

A Bayesian approach to person perception

“…Bülthoff, 2012;Cellerino, Borghetti, & Sartucci, 2004) that has also been reported in chimpanzees (de Waal & Pokorny, 2008). A similar 'male bias' has also been found for body shape (Johnson, Iida, & Tassinary, 2012), hands (Gaetano, van der Zwan, Blair, & Brooks, 2014) and biological motion (Troje, Sadr, Geyer, & Nakayama, 2006). It has been suggested that, in the history of humans, misclassifying a man as female has generally proved to be potentially more dangerous than misclassifying a woman as male (Armann & Bülthoff, 2012).…”

Seeing the World Topsy-Turvy: The Primary Role of Kinematics in Biological Motion Inversion Effects

“…The other effect that manifests in these data is the so-called “male bias.” Here, for both the structure (upright and inverted) and kinematics (upright only) continua, point-light walkers that actually carried weak female cues were misperceived as male. The male bias previously has been reported to manifest not only for point-light walkers ( Troje, Sadr, Geyer, & Nakayama, 2006 ; Troje & Szabo, 2006 ), but also for hands ( Gaetano, Brooks, & van der Zwan, 2012 ; Gaetano, Brooks, van der Zwan, Hayward, & Oxner, 2013 ; Gaetano, van der Zwan, Blair, & Brooks, 2014 ), and for faces ( Hess, Adams, Grammer, & Kleck, 2009 ). That it manifests here in both conditions suggests that for point-light walkers at least, the bias is driven by both structure and kinematics processing mechanisms.…”

Man, You Might Look Like a Woman — If a Child Is Next to You

“…A robust male-bias can also emerge as a side-effect when participants categorize faces ( Armann & Bülthoff, 2012 ; Johnson, Freeman, & Pauker, 2012 ; Wild et al, 2000 ), and may be enhanced by the emotionality of the faces ( Bayet et al, 2015 ; Hess, Adams, Grammer, & Kleck, 2009 ). Independent of cues like emotion or pigmentation, ambiguous face ( Davidenko, 2007 ), body ( Johnson, Iida, & Tassinary, 2012 ) and hand ( Gaetano, van der Zwan, Blair, & Brooks, 2014 ) shapes, as well as point-like walkers ( Schouten, Troje, Brooks, van der Zwan, & Verfaillie, 2010 ) also have produced the male-bias.…”

“…One reason for this shortcoming is that participants are generally only provided bipolar choice options: male versus female . In one study ( Gaetano et al, 2014 ), participants were asked to indicate yes or no whether a certain stimulus was male, and separately whether a stimulus was female, instead of the classical male-female categorization task. As a consequence, participants were more likely to assign male gender when targeting male hands, as well as less likely to assign female gender when searching for female hands.…”