How sex puts you in gendered shoes: sexuality-priming leads to gender-based self-perception and behavior.

Scripts for sexual behavior dictate that women be submissive and tender and that men be assertive and dominant, reflecting the stereotypical view of women as communal and of men as agentic. Six experiments tested the hypothesis that exposure to sexuality cues causes men's and women's momentary self-perceptions and concomitant behavior to become more gender-typical. Using both pictorial and verbal prime materials that were presented both supraliminally and subliminally, we found that sex-priming strengthened gender-based self-perceptions (i.e., faster self-categorization as a woman or man; Study 1), heightened identification with one's own gender (Study 2), increased gender self-stereotyping (Study 3), and elicited greater submissiveness in women's behavior and greater assertiveness in men's behavior (Studies 4 and 5). These findings indicate that sex-priming causes self-perception and social behavior to become "attuned" to gender stereotypes. Study 6 demonstrated that these sex-priming effects can be eliminated by modern gender role primes. The potentially detrimental effects of sex-priming and possible countermeasures are discussed.

The neural substrates of person comparison--an fMRI study.

Person comparison is pervasive in social judgment and human decision making and yet its neural substrate is poorly explored. We measured brain activity when participants compared psychological (intelligence) and physical (height) characteristics of famous people and found activation of medial frontal, orbitofrontal and limbic areas and the temporoparietal junction. This network was largely driven by the psychological comparison, with activity being higher for intelligence than height comparison in several areas in medial prefrontal cortex, suggesting that their activation scales with the demand on person comparison. The person comparison network overlaps strikingly with that commonly described for classic theory of mind tasks. We interpret this overlap as indexing the use of perspective taking common to person comparison and theory of mind.