Interactions of Visual and Auditory Information in Social Perception related to Gender and Ethnicity
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Final Report Abstract
People have the tendency to categorize others into social groups as soon as they perceive them. For example, they quickly categorize someone as a man or woman, German or foreigner, or as a heterosexual or gay man. This social categorization is the starting point of stereotyping and discrimination. For instance, if someone is categorized as a Turk, assumptions may be made concerning his competence, and consequently, he may be discriminated by not being selected for a job interview. The present project went beyond previous studies by using complex and ecologically valid stimuli to investigate social categorization related to gender and ethnicity, its preconditions, and its consequences, in three lines of work. For example, instead of simple stimuli such as category labels or static pictures, we presented short videos of target people. The focus of the first line was on categorization based on ethnicity if ecologically valid stimuli are used. One main finding was the enormous power of accents for social categorization. For example, if German-looking and Italian-looking young men were presented to participants, and some of them spoke with an accent, whereas others spoke standard German, their appearance did not affect categorization at all: They were perceived as “the Italians” and “the Germans”, based on their accent. If videos of Asian-looking, Asian-accented, and Caucasian-looking, standard-German speaking men and women were presented, the typical textbook finding disappeared that gender is always the first category used: Instead, ethnicity was used more than gender for grouping the targets. The latter finding implies that ecologically more valid stimuli are needed to arrive at correct conclusions. The second line of work demonstrated how such social categorization leads to various forms of discrimination. Interestingly, if appearance and accent lead to different social categorizations, various forms of positive and negative discrimination may result. For example, a Turkish-looking man who then speaks standard German is judged as particularly competent: as more competent than a German-looking man speaking standard German. This was found only if he was first seen, then heard. The third line of work focused on social categorization based on sexual orientation and its preconditions. We investigated speech markers correlated with sexual orientation in German speech and their influence on the categorization as heterosexual vs. gay/lesbian. A first surprising finding was that the evidence for sexual-orientation related speech markers was much weaker than stereotypes suggest. As one case in point, most gay men do not speak with a higher-pitched voice than most heterosexual man. Instead, within each sexual-orientation group, there is much variability in speech markers, and this variability is related to speakers’ psychological features such as gender role orientation (e.g., masculinity/femininity) and social-group identification. In sum, take-home messages of the project are: Accent-based and dialect-based discrimination is potent but often overlooked both in research and in practice. For Turks to be stereotyped as competent, it is essential to speak standard German. Stereotypes of sexual-orientation based speech markers are gross simplifications. Project findings have been met with much public interest (e.g., a BBC radio interview, a National Geographic small feature, an interview for a feature on Kulturradio on RBB, an interview on MDR, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the first PI’s appearance at “Planet Wissen” as an expert on prejudice).
Publications
- (in press). Foreign-looking native-accented people are evaluated more positively when seen rather than heard first. Social Psychological and Personality Science
Hansen, K., Rakić, T., & Steffens, M. C.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617732389) - (2011). Blinded by the accent! The minor role of looks in ethnic categorization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 16-29
Rakić, T., Steffens, M. C., & Mummendey, A.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021522) - (2011). When it matters how you pronounce it: The influence of regional accents on job interview outcome. British Journal of Psychology, 102, 868-883
Rakić, T., Steffens, M. C., & Mummendey, A.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02051.x) - (2013). Dialects and accents in Western Europe. In H. Giles & B. Watson (Eds.), The social meanings of language, dialect, and accent: International perspectives on speech styles (pp. 45-63). New York: Peter Lang
Rakić, T., & Steffens, M. C.
- (2013). How experience shapes memory for faces: An event-related potential study on the own-age bias. Biological Psychology, 94, 369-379
Wiese, H., Wolff, N., Steffens, M. C., & Schweinberger, S. R.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2013.07.001) - (2013). Participant sexual orientation matters: New evidence on the gender bias in face recognition. Experimental Psychology, 60, 362-367
Steffens, M. C., Landmann, S., & Mecklenbräuker, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000209) - (2014). Language attitudes: The social determinants and consequences of language variation. In T. Holtgraves (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Language and Social Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Giles, H., & Rakić, T.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199838639.013.030) - (2014). The emergent nature of culturally meaningful categorization and language use: A Japanese-Italian comparison of age categories. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 45, 431-451
Karasawa, M., Maass, A., Rakić, T., & Kato, A.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022113509882) - (2014). When actions speak louder than words: Preventing discrimination of nonstandard speakers. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33, 66-75
Hansen, K., Rakić, T., & Steffens, M. C.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X13499761) - (2016). Traditional masculinity and femininity: Validation of a new scale assessing gender roles. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 956
Kachel, S., Steffens, M. C., & Niedlich, C.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00956) - (2017). Acoustic correlates of sexual orientation and gender-role self-concept in women’s speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 141, 4793-4809
Kachel, S., Simpson, A. P., & Steffens, M. C.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4988684) - (2017). Competent and warm? How mismatching appearance and accent influence first impressions. Experimental Psychology, 64, 27-36
Hansen, K., Rakić, T., & Steffens, M. C.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000348) - (2017). When appearance does not match accent: Neural correlates of ethnicity-related expectancy violations. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
Hansen, K., Steffens, M. C., Rakić, T., & Wiese, H.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsw148)
