Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When people read the sentence “The babysitter put on a TV show for the kids because he needed to use the washroom,” the male identity prompted by the pronoun clashes with the stereotypical expectation of babysitters as female, rendering the pronoun “he” more difficult to process than “she” would be. We ask whether participants’ HEXACO PI-R personality traits, Political Ideology, and Disgust Sensitivity (DS-R) modulate their reactions to pronouns Congruent versus Incongruent with stereotyped role nouns. 80 English-speaking participants read 40 sentences with female/male stereotypes and were asked to rate each item a Likert scale (1-6) from “Completely Inappropriate” to “Completely Appropriate.” Initial analysis indicates that Openness correlates with higher ratings of Appropriateness for Incongruent stereotypes, and Introversion correlates with low Appropriateness ratings of Incongruent, Female stereotypes. We also expect a correlation between high Conservativeness, Disgust Sensitivity and low ratings of Appropriateness for Incongruent stereotypes.