Department of Communication Studies, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2011 Mar 31;6(3):e18025. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0018025.
We found that judgments of a perceptually ambiguous social category, sexual orientation, varied as a function of a perceptually obvious social category, race. Sexual orientation judgments tend to exploit a heuristic of gender inversion that often promotes accuracy. We predicted that an orthogonal social category that is itself gendered, race, would impact both sexual orientation categorizations and their accuracy. Importantly, overlaps in both the phenotypes and stereotypes associated with specific race and sex categories (e.g., the categories Black and Men and the categories Asian and Women) lead race categories to be decidedly gendered. Therefore, we reasoned that race categories would bias judgments of sexual orientation and their accuracy because of the inherent gendered nature. Indeed, both gay and straight perceivers in the United States were more likely to judge targets to be gay when target race was associated with gender-atypical stereotypes or phenotypes (e.g., Asian Men). Perceivers were also most accurate when judging the sexual orientation of the most strongly gender-stereotyped groups (i.e., Asian Women and Black Men), but least accurate when judging the sexual orientation of counter-stereotypical groups (i.e., Asian men and Black Women). Signal detection analyses confirmed that this pattern of accuracy was achieved because of heightened sensitivity to cues in groups who more naturally conform to gendered stereotypes (Asian Women and Black Men). Implications for social perception are discussed.
我们发现，对感知上模棱两可的社会类别（性取向）的判断，会随着感知上明显的社会类别（种族）的变化而变化。性取向的判断往往利用了性别反转的启发式，这种启发式通常能提高准确性。我们预测，本身具有性别特征的另一个正交社会类别（种族），将同时影响性取向的分类及其准确性。重要的是，与特定种族和性别类别相关联的表型和刻板印象（例如，类别“黑人和男人”以及类别“亚洲人和女人”）存在重叠，这使得种族类别具有明显的性别特征。因此，我们推断种族类别会影响性取向的判断及其准确性，因为其具有内在的性别特征。事实上，在美国，无论是同性恋还是异性恋的感知者，当目标种族与性别非典型的刻板印象或表型（例如，亚洲男性）相关联时，更有可能判断目标为同性恋。当判断最具性别刻板印象的群体（即亚洲女性和黑人男性）的性取向时，感知者的判断最准确，但当判断反刻板印象的群体（即亚洲男性和黑人女性）的性取向时，判断最不准确。信号检测分析证实，这种准确性模式是由于对更符合性别刻板印象的群体的线索的敏感性提高而实现的（亚洲女性和黑人男性）。讨论了对社会感知的影响。
