“Lights on at the end of the party”: Are lads’ mags mainstreaming dangerous sexism?

Research has suggested that some magazines targeted at young men –lads’ mags– are normalizing extreme sexist views by presenting those views in a mainstream context. Consistent with this view, young men in Study 1 (n = 90) identified more with derogatory quotes about women drawn from recent lads’ mags, and from interviews with convicted rapists, when those quotes were attributed to lads’ mags, than when they were attributed to convicted rapists. In Study 2, 40 young women and men could not reliably judge the source of those same quotes. While these participants sometimes voiced the belief that the content of lads’ mags was ‘normal’ while rapists’ talk was ‘extreme’, they categorized quotes from both sources as derogatory with equal frequency. Jointly, the two studies show an overlap in the content of convicted rapists’ talk and the contents of contemporary lads’ mags, and suggest that the framing of such content within lads’ mags may normalize it for young men.     

Distinctiveness and correlation in conceptual structure: behavioral and computational studies

Patients with category-specific deficits have motivated a range of hypotheses about the structure of the conceptual system. One class of models claims that apparent category dissociations emerge from the internal structure of concepts rather than fractionation of the system into separate substores. This account claims that distinctive properties of concepts in the living domain are vulnerable because of their weak correlation with other features. Given the assumption that mutual activation among correlated properties produces faster activation in the normal system, the authors predicted a disadvantage for the distinctive features of living things for unimpaired adults. Results of a speeded feature verification study supported this prediction, as did a computational simulation in which networks mapped from orthography to semantics.