Who are you to me?: A relational approach to examining race-gender associations

Abstract

Scholars have posited that characteristics of a perceptual target impact how readily gender is associated with them, arguing that cultural biases in the U.S. make it such that certain racial groups are more or less associated with womanhood and manhood. We provide a novel expansion on this work by integrating characteristics of the perceiver, suggesting that individuals have a fundamental cognitive association between racial in-group members and gender. In four studies, we find that exposure to racial in-group members (as opposed to racial out-group members) facilitates the processing of gendered information relative to gender-irrelevant stimuli across both the familial (Studies 1–3) and employment (Study 4) contexts, suggesting that gender is indeed more strongly associated with racial in-group members. Using a sequential priming paradigm, we find this to be true among White (Studies 1–4), Asian (Studies 2–4), and Black (Studies 3–4) perceivers. The present work highlights the inherently relational nature of gender and gender roles, suggesting that theory about how gender intersects with race is incomplete without consideration of the psychological relationship between perceptual targets and perceivers. We thus provide an important expansion on theory about person perception at the intersection of gender and race.