Investigation of gender bias in the mental imagery of faces
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it