A groundbreaking international study led by Curtis Edward Phills of the University of Oregon has illuminated a complex reality underlying how people conceptualize social groups, specifically revealing that the default mental image of certain social categories in attitudes tends to favor men over women. Published in the prestigious open-access journal PLOS One on June 25, 2025, this multi-region investigation challenges longstanding assumptions about gender in social perception and highlights critical nuances in how attitudes towards politicians and racial groups are formed and vary across regions.
For decades, psychological and sociological research has suggested that in many social contexts, men implicitly serve as the default representation of various social groups. This phenomenon manifests vividly in language, cultural stereotypes, and cognitive categorization. However, until now, empirical evidence exploring this bias within the specific domain of affective attitudes—how warmly or positively people regard different groups—has been sparse and fragmented. Phills and colleagues address this gap by undertaking an extensive survey-based study involving over 5,000 undergraduate participants from diverse global regions, examining attitudes toward generalized social categories and dissecting them by gender.
Their findings reveal that attitudes toward politicians and Black individuals are more strongly linked to attitudes towards the men of those groups rather than the women. This tendency aligns with a deeper, intersectional invisibility framework, where Black women are often cognitively marginalized within the racial category itself, effectively rendering Black men the prototypical exemplar for the group. This has profound implications, as it suggests that existing prejudice and stereotyping may systematically overlook the experiences and identities of Black women, propagating a narrowed societal perception.
Intriguingly, the study finds exceptions to this male-default pattern. Attitudes toward white individuals, for example, are more closely associated with attitudes toward white women than white men. Meanwhile, perceptions of police officers, criminals, and East Asian people do not robustly tie to either gender within those groups, indicating the default representation is dynamic and context-dependent rather than universal. These results underscore the complexity of social cognition and hint at the interplay of cultural, racial, and gendered dynamics sculpting how groups are viewed emotionally.
Delving deeper, the researchers analyzed the responses based on the participants’ own demographic backgrounds. Notably, Black and white female participants showed a distinct pattern: they did not default to men when evaluating their racial group. This suggests that personal identity shapes how individuals navigate and potentially resist prevailing cultural biases about gender defaults, highlighting the importance of lived experience in attitude formation.
Further stratifying data by geographical regions added another rich layer to the findings. Regions characterized by traditional gender norms demonstrated a stronger propensity to regard men as the default exemplars of social groups. This regional variation underscores the cultural specificity of cognitive biases and repudiates simplistic universal models of social perception. It also points to the potential of societal norms and institutional structures in shaping the mental architecture of attitudes toward gender and social categories.
Phills emphasizes the transformative power of large-scale team science in achieving these insights, highlighting the collaboration of researchers across myriad countries, including the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, and Africa. This cross-national approach permitted not only the examination of widespread trends but also the identification of nuanced regional divergences. Such an approach is essential for parsing the interplay between global gender stereotypes and locally mediated cultural attitudes.
From a methodological standpoint, the study utilized comprehensive survey instruments that separately measured attitudes toward the women and men of each social group, including politicians, Black, East Asian, and white individuals, as well as police officers and criminals. This granularity enabled researchers to dissect the relative weights participants implicitly assigned to gendered subgroup members when expressing generalized attitudes, a novel analytic framing that reveals subtle cognitive biases often masked in broader category evaluations.
The implications of this research extend far beyond academic theory. Understanding that men often serve as the default cognitive representation of complex social groups informs the ongoing dialogue about intersectionality, social justice, and prejudice reduction. If societal attitudes habitually invisibilize women within certain racial or occupational categories, policy interventions and public discourse must be attuned to these biases to craft more inclusive social narratives.
Moreover, the observed variability between groups and regions challenges one-size-fits-all approaches to combating gender and racial bias, calling for strategies that consider local cultural mores and the intersection of race, gender, and societal roles. The research suggests that efforts to elevate women’s representation and challenge male defaults must be contextually sensitive, recognizing that these dynamics shift across populations and social spheres.
Phills adds that these findings significantly enrich the understanding of intersectional invisibility, a concept describing how members of marginalized subgroups (such as Black women) may be cognitively omitted or underrepresented within broader social categories. This invisibility has cascading effects on social recognition, resource allocation, and empowerment, necessitating further investigation into how attitudes shape and reflect social realities.
In sum, the multi-region study presents a sophisticated portrait of the cognitive underpinnings of social attitudes, revealing how gender—and its interaction with race and region—dynamically informs who is mentally envisioned as the standard member of a group. By combining rigorous survey methodologies, broad geographic scope, and a nuanced theoretical lens, this work sets a new benchmark in understanding the subtleties of social perception and its profound cultural consequences.
The research also underscores the importance of transcending singular disciplinary perspectives by pooling expertise globally, a testament to how collaborative team science can unearth foundational insights into complex social phenomena. As the scientific community and policymakers grapple with questions of representation, identity, and equality, this study provides a critical empirical foundation illustrating that the question of whether "man" is the default in attitudes is not absolute but contingent on group and region.
For those invested in dismantling systemic bias, this research offers both a caution and a guide: cultural context and intersectionality are indispensable lenses for deciphering and reshaping the mental models that underpin social group attitudes. By illuminating the variable operation of male defaults, the study encourages a reexamination of social categories to ensure fuller visibility and inclusion of women, particularly those at the intersection of race and gender, shaping a more equitable future for all.
Subject of Research: Not explicitly stated, but focused on social attitudes and gender defaults in perceptions across multiple global regions.
Article Title: Multi-region investigation of ‘man’ as default in attitudes
News Publication Date: 25-Jun-2025
Web References:
DOI link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0323938
References:
Phills CE, Miller JK, Buchanan EM, Williams A, Meyers C, Brown ER, et al. (2025) Multi-region investigation of ‘man’ as default in attitudes. PLoS One 20(6): e0323938.
Image Credits:
Credit: Phills et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0
Keywords:
Gender bias, social attitudes, intersectionality, male default, stereotyping, cross-cultural research, racial perception, social cognition, prejudice, team science.
