Investigation of gender bias in the mental imagery of faces

People tend to think of the prototypical person as a man more than as a woman, but this bias has primarily been observed in language-based tasks. Here, we investigated whether this bias is also present in the mental imagery of faces. A preregistered cross-cultural reverse-correlation study including participants from six WEIRD and non-WEIRD countries varying in gender equality (i.e., China, Ghana, Norway, Pakistan, Turkey, and the US; N = 645) unexpectedly suggested that people imagine the face of a generic person more as a woman than as a man. Replicating this unexpected result, a second preregistered study (N = 115) showed that U.S. participants imagine the face of a typical person as being more similar to their imagined face of a woman than of a man. We discuss explanations for these unexpected findings, including the possibility that the prototypical person is male-biased-consistent with previous work-but the default face may be female-biased.

Automated summary

People tend to think of the prototypical person as a man rather than a woman, but this bias is also observed in the mental imagery of faces. The study suggests that people imagine the face of a typical person to be more similar to a woman. Explanations for these unexpected findings include the possibility of a male bias in the prototypical person but a female bias in the default face.