Gender Essentialism,Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation,and Filial Piety as Predictors for Transprejudice in Chinese People

Sex Roles - Although research on prejudice against gender and sexual minorities has been increasing in recent years, little attention has been paid to predictors for transprejudice and its...     

The Effects of Gender Neuroessentialism on Transprejudice: An Experimental Study

This experimental study examined the impacts of gender neuroessentialism on stereotyping and prejudice against transgender people. We randomly assigned 132 Chinese, mostly heterosexual college students to read one of three fictitious articles in which the first article explained sex differences in personality and social behavior by neurological factors (biological determinist), a second article questioned this deterministic claim (interactionist), and a third article was unrelated to gender (neutral baseline). The biological determinist condition aimed to foster essentialist beliefs by priming the deterministic ways that the brain relates to personality and behavior, whereas the interactionist condition highlighted the interactive roles of the brain and environments on people’s personality and behavior. We found that participants in the biological determinist condition showed more negative stereotypes and stronger prejudicial attitudes toward transgender people compared with participants in the interactionist condition and those in the control condition. There were no significant differences in transprejudice between the interactionist and control conditions. The present study represents one of the few studies that examined the connection between gender essentialism and transprejudice. The findings suggest that essentialist claims that ground the male/female binary in biology may lead to more transprejudice.     

Effects of biological determinist and interactionist causal explanations on undergraduate students' stigma of children with attention deficits hyperactivity disorders: An experimental investigation

This experimental study examined the effects of biological explanations on individuals' stigma against children with ADHD. We randomly assigned 174 undergraduate students to read one of the three fictitious articles: the first article focused on the determining role of biology in affecting children's ADHD symptoms (biological determinist), the second article highlighted the interplay between biological and environmental factors (interactionist), and the third article was unrelated to ADHD (control). Analyses of variance showed that participants who read the biological determinist message, relative to the control group, were (a) less likely to blame the children for their problems, but (b) more likely to endorse fixed beliefs about the nature of ADHD (entity beliefs). Thus, the overall direct effect of biological determinist message on desire for social distance was not significant. By contrast, participants who read the interactionist message showed (a) less blame attribution and (b) lower levels of entity beliefs, which contributed to less desire for social distance. These findings suggest that (a) presenting biological information regarding ADHD in a deterministic way may not be an effective way to reduce stigma, whereas (b) providing an interactionist account of ADHD may undermine the potential negative effect of an exclusively biological explanation.