Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The folk theory of gender seems to involve two contradictorybeliefs that people can hold simultaneously. One belief is thatgender is biologically determined and immutable, and theother is that one has to earn gender membership by followinggender norms or otherwise risk disqualifying oneself as a realmember of the gender category. To explain this contradiction,as Leslie (2015) suggested, we turned to the dual-characterconcept framework proposed by Knobe, Prasada, andNewman (2013). Within this framework, we examinedwhether gender has two separate, parallel dimensions forevaluating category membership such that one can be amember in one sense but not the other. We found that genderconcepts appeared dual-character-like in metalinguisticjudgments but not in judgments of specific individuals whoviolate prescriptive gender norms identified by previousresearch. We might be witnessing a historical change wheregender categories remain dual-character-like, but adherenceto specific gender norms is no longer seen as definitional.