Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When people hear ’The babysitter/ put on a TV show/ for the kids/ because he/ needed to use/ the washroom’, the maleidentity of the subject clashes with the stereotypical expectation of babysitters as female, rendering the pronoun he moredifficult to process than she. We asked whether participants political views would modulate listening times to pronounscongruent/incongruent with stereotyped role nouns in spoken sentences.74 English speaking participants listened to sentences with female/male stereotypes in segments and pushed the spacebarto proceed; these reaction times were recorded. Correlating the results with scores from a Political Ideology questionnaireusing Generalized Additive Models, we found slower reaction times with incongruent pronouns on the segment followingthe pronoun (p¡.005). More interestingly, we found an interaction between participants political ideology scores andpronoun congruence on this segment: participants who were higher in Conservatism showed longer reaction times toincongruent pronouns (p¡ .0001).