Is Man the Measure of All Things? A Social Cognitive Account of Androcentrism

Abstract

Androcentrism refers to the propensity to center society around men and men’s needs, priorities, and values and to relegate women to the periphery. Androcentrism also positions men as the gender-neutral standard while marking women as gender-specific. Examples of androcentrism include the use of male terms (e.g., he), images, and research participants to represent everyone. Androcentrism has been shown to have serious consequences. For example, women’s health has been adversely affected by over-generalized medical research based solely on male participants. Nonetheless, relatively little is known about androcentrism’s proximate psychological causes. In the present review, we propose a social cognitive perspective arguing that both social power and categorization processes are integral to understanding androcentrism. We present and evaluate three possible pathways to androcentrism deriving from (a) men being more frequently instantiated than women, (b) masculinity being more “ideal” than femininity, and/or (c) masculinity being more common than femininity.

The Moral Psychology of Raceless, Genderless Strangers

“…If participants in moral psychology experiments are mostly American and WEIRD (Henrich et al, 2010), then they likely imagine targets who are White and WEIRD. Not only does egocentrism likely distort study conclusions, but research on androcentrism (Bailey, LaFrance, & Dovidio, 2019) and Eurocentrism (Ghavami & Peplau, 2013) suggests that White male is the “reference point” by which other groups are measured, at least in American culture. When participants read about a raceless, genderless target, they likely imagine someone who is both White and male (e.g., Ghavami & Peplau, 2013; Goff & Kahn, 2013).…”

Love is heterosexual‐by‐default: Cultural heterosexism in default prototypes of romantic love

“…Cultural heterosexism works through laws, language, institutions, and individual thoughts and attitudes (Herek, 2007). In its emphasis on defaults, cultural heterosexism is psychologically similar to such constructs as androcentrism (Bailey, LaFrance, & Dovidio, 2019), White privilege (McIntosh, 1988), and cisgenderism (Ansara & Hegarty, 2012). Like these other defaulting ideologies, cultural heterosexism can affect individuals' thinking about which people and groups are implicitly represented by categories, such as 'women' (Butler, 1990), 'citizens' (Bell & Binnie, 2000), 'family' (Kitzinger, 2005), and 'Black men' (Petsko & Bodenhausen, 2019).…”

Forging Diversity‐Science‐Informed Guidelines for Research on Race and Racism in Psychological Science

“…However, there is still a discipline‐wide tendency to begin examining a particular topic of study using mostly White, educated, Judeo‐Christian samples and only later ask whether the findings differ across race, nationality, and other meaningful forms of group membership. This practice has the potential to perpetuate the notion that patterns of thought and behavior among Whites are “normal” and neutral, and that deviations from these patterns among racial and ethnic minority groups are what necessitates scientific explanation (Bailey, LaFrance, & Dovidio, ; Hegarty, ; Hegarty, Pratto, & Lemieux, ; Markus, ).…”