To Be a Tough Guy: Social-Categorical Thinking about Gender in a Chinese Primitive Patriarchal Tribe.

Abstract

Previous research has shown that people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can be embodied within their sensorimotor experiences. For example, people tend to associate "toughness" with males and "tenderness" with females in their spoken and mental metaphors. In the current research, we investigated the role of culture in this embodied categorization of gender, focusing specifically on the role of social system and organization. Based on sociological findings that highlight the dominance of men in patriarchy, we hypothesized that Geba, a primitive patriarchal tribe in southwest China, were more likely to use the sensory experience of toughness for representations of gender categories than matched groups of Kham Tibetans. Across two studies, both groups of participants who were primed with the proprioceptive experience of toughness were more prone to categorize sex-ambiguous faces as male (vs. female) than those who received sensory feedback about the relative tenderness, which replicated prior finding in Western participants. Notably, the embodied effect of toughness on categorical judgments of gender was more pronounced in Geba Tibetans than Kham Tibetans, which suggests that social system may be an important determinant of social-categorical thinking about gender. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of cultural dynamic in accounting for embodied cognition.