Is gender primacy universal?

Abstract

Emerging evidence suggests that gender is a defining feature of personhood. Studies show that gender is the primary social category individuals use to perceive humanness and the social category most strongly related to seeing someone—or something—as human. However, the universality of gender’s primacy in social perception and its precedence over other social categories like race and age have been debated. We examined the primacy of gender perception in the Mayangna community of Nicaragua, a population with minimal exposure to Western influences, to test whether the primacy of gender categorization in humanization is more likely to be a culturally specific construct or a cross-cultural and potentially universal phenomenon. Consistent with findings from North American populations [A. E. Martin, M. F. Mason, J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 123, 292–315 (2022)], the Mayangna ascribed gender to nonhuman objects more strongly than any other social category—including age, race, sexual orientation, disability, and religion—and gender was the only social category that uniquely predicted perceived humanness (i.e., the extent to which a nonhuman entity was seen as “human”). This pattern persisted even in the most isolated subgroup of the sample, who had no exposure to Western culture or media. The present results thus suggest that gender’s primacy in social cognition is a widely generalizable, and potentially universal, phenomenon.