Explicit gender stereotypes and sexually polymorphic cognition by gender identity

TL;DR

This study explores how gender stereotypes and identity affect cognitive performance in cis and transgender/nonbinary individuals.

Contribution

It is the first to examine SPC in a sample including transgender and nonbinary people and how stereotypes influence cognitive performance.

Findings

TNB people showed a distinct cognitive profile compared to cis men and women.

Explicit gender stereotypes had no direct impact on cognitive performance in this diverse sample.

Cognitive gender differences varied across experimental conditions, suggesting inconsistency in the literature.

Abstract

Sexually polymorphic cognition (SPC) is influenced by sex differences and gender diversity. These differences have long been studied from a biological approach, but more and more studies are pointing to the importance of considering socio-culturalzgender-related factors. Several studies have shown, for example, that explicit gender stereotypes can modulate performance on cognitive tasks that are sexually dimorphic. However, no study has examined the relationship between gender stereotypes and SPC in a population that includes transgender and nonbinary (TNB) people.

We recruited 488 adults who completed eight cognitive tasks measuring a range of cognitive functions during a 150-minute session. The three groups were cis women (n = 160), cis men (n = 172), and TNB people (n = 156). Participants were randomly assigned to three experimental conditions: a control condition and two conditions in which participants were exposed to an explicit gender stereotype prior to each task. Psychosocial data were collected using self-report questionnaires.

The cognitive performance of TNB people was similar to that of cis men in a judgment of line orientation task, similar to that of cis women in a fine motor skills task and superior to both cis men and cis women in a verbal learning task. Explicit gender stereotypes had no direct impact on cognitive performance. Interestingly, differences in performance between cis men, cis women and TNB people were not apparent under all experimental conditions, reflecting the inconsistency of results in the literature.

Our results show that the inclusion of gender diverse people allows further exploration of SPC beyond “sexual dimorphisms” and that differences in cognition cannot be explained by birth-assigned sex alone. Moreover, sex/gender variations in cognition across different stereotype induction conditions highlight the lack of consistency in the literature on SPC. Future research should ascertain whether protocol features between studies can explain the variability in results and/or whether experimenters’ stereotyped beliefs inadvertnantly influence the conclusions drawn from their studies.

Many studies have shown that there are sex differences in cognition. Briefly, women perform better on verbal and fine motor tasks, while men perform better on spatial and mental rotation tasks. With regard to people with other gender identities and even sexual orientations other than heterosexual, the research points out that these sexual differences are reflected differently. However, more studies are needed. To understand sexual differences in cognition, several authors are interested in the role of gender stereotypes and have shown that verbalising a stereotype explicitly before a cognitive task can modify performance on this task. Our aim was therefore to determine how explicit stereotypes could influence sexual differences in cognition in a sexually and gender diverse sample. A total of 488 participants were recruited to represent different sexual orientations and gender identities. Participants completed eight cognitive tasks and several questionnaires over a period of about two hours. Participants were separated into three different experimental conditions; two in which the experimenter said before each task that it was usually better performed by men or by women, and a control condition with no stereotype induction. The results showed that gender diverse people appear to have a distinct cognitive profile from cis men and cis women. Also, explicit stereotypes did not directly affect cognitive performance in this diverse population. However, explarotory analysis reveald that gender differences in cognitive tasks varied from condition to condition, suggesting that these differences were not robust to different testing protocols.

Cis women perform better on fine motor and verbal learning tasks and cis men perform better on mental rotation and line orientations judgement tasks.

Transgender and nonbinary people perform better than cis men on a fine motor task, better than both cis men and cis women on a verbal learning task and better than cis women on a judgment of line orientations task.

Explicit gender stereotypes had no direct impact on cognitive performance in our sexually and gender diversified sample.

Different experimental conditions reveald variations in cognitive gender differences; the control condition reveals gender differences for mental rotation, fine motor skills and judgment of line orientation, the congruent stereotype condition reveals no gender differences, and the incongruent stereotype condition reveals gender differences for verbal fluency, verbal learning, visuospatial memory and fine motor skills.

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