Maggie Nichols¹, Xiuyuan Flora Zhang², Kimberly W. Wong¹; ¹Williams College, ²Brown University

How faithfully do we remember those that we encounter? Prior work in social psychology suggests the answer depends on gender and context: In meetings or conferences, female speakers are expected to talk less and male speakers are expected to dominate the conversation—resulting in female speakers being judged as having talked longer than male speakers, even if they actually hadn’t. This bias in judgment has been often attributed to gendered cultural stereotypes (e.g. of traditional authority and dominance). But what if this bias goes beyond misattribution of talking time? Here we propose that this could even be captured by more fundamental differences in memory for individuals of different genders—before any words are exchanged at all. In short, even when simply passively viewing men and women, might women be remembered as having lingered longer? On each trial of the study, observers were shown a full body image of a male or female individual (White, Asian, Latino, or Black), for varying durations (from 500ms to 1500ms). Observers then reproduced the image duration by holding down the spacebar. Despite gender and race being completely irrelevant to the task, observers nevertheless consistently reproduced women for longer durations than men. In particular, this effect was significant for white female images compared to white male images. Effects persisted even with identical bodies, varying only the head. We interpret these results as evidence of representational asymmetry in memory for men vs. women—even in the absence of behavior, words, or context. Because women are culturally backgrounded while men are allocated more time and space, any duration that a woman actually occupies may be encoded as disproportionately long compared to male counterparts. This difference may explain several downstream higher-level social judgments—from a woman’s talkativeness to her assertiveness—simply because she is spontaneously remembered as occupying more time.

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Williams College Office of the Dean, as well as the Williams College Psychology Department.