The brightness dimension as a marker of gender across cultures and age
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The brightness dimension as a marker of gender across cultures and age Carla Sebastián‑Enesco1 · Gün R. Semin2,3 Received: 31 March 2019 / Accepted: 6 June 2019 © The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Universally, female skin color is lighter than male skin color, irrespective of geographical location. This difference is a distinctive and universal adaptive pattern that emerges after puberty. We address whether this sexual dimorphism is cognitively and culturally represented to ground gender. To this end, we examine a non-Western, non-industrialized population, namely the Wichí (Salta, Argentina) and a Western industrialized population (Spain). The two cultural populations included both adults and prepubescent children. Across two experiments, we utilized a novel task with children and adults who had to make a choice for a female (male) target person between two identical objects that differed only in terms of their brightness. The results in both experiments revealed that the children from the two cultural communities choose a lighter colored object for the female target and a darker version of the same object for the male target. This pattern held across cultures irrespective of the age of participants, except for the male Wichí participants. We discuss how sexual dimorphism in skin color contributes to a universal grounding of the gender category, and advance possible explanations as to why Wichi males did not consistently link gender and brightness.
Introduction Few abstract categories, if any, are marked unambiguously, both objectively and subjectively. Sex and gender, however, aside from their polymorphous cultural and political semantics, constitute precisely such categories. On the one hand, sex is marked, unambiguously and universally, by the sexual dimorphism of skin color—an objective, evolved physical reality. Universally, females carry a lighter skin than males (Frost, 1988; Jablonski & Chaplin, 2000). On the other Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01213-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Carla Sebastián‑Enesco [email protected] * Gün R. Semin [email protected] 1
Education Sciences, Universidad de La Rioja, Calle Luis Ulloa 2, 26004 Logroño, Spain
2
William James Center for Research, ISPA - Instituto Universitário, Rua Jardim do Tabaco 41, 1149‑041 Lisbon, Portugal
3
Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
hand, this objective dimorphism is anchored culturally on a brightness dimension in the case of gender, a socially constituted abstract category (e.g., Semin & Palma, 2014; Semin, Palma, Acartürk, & Dziuba, 2018). It is a representation that escapes conscious access (e.g., Carrito & Semin, 2019). Indeed, the anchoring of gender on the brightness dimension appears to be consistent across different cultures such as the Portuguese, Dutch, and Turkish cultures (i.e., Semin & Palma, 2014; Semin et al., 2018). In short, objectively females have a l
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