Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The statement “Girls are as good as boys at math” appears toexpress gender equality, but research has shown that peopleinfer a gender difference from such statements: the group inthe complement position (boys) is judged to be superior. Arepeople aware that the syntax of these statements influencestheir judgments and do these framing effects generalize toother groups and inferences? We addressed these questions byreplicating and extending previous work, showing that (1)syntactic framing effects extend to politically chargedinferences about religious groups and terrorism, and (2) themajority of people recognize subject-complement statementsas influential in their judgments, but framing effects are foundonly in those who fail to recognize this influence. Those whodo cite this syntax as influential tend to show a reverseframing effect, suggesting they may be sensitive to the biasimplicit in such statements and consciously act to resist it.