Humanness as Social Normativity: Neural Evidence that Humanized Faces Align with Gender Schemas

13/06/2026

AI Summary

Greater perceived humanness predicts stronger gender-consistent evaluations: increased femininity for female faces and increased masculinity for male faces.
Multiple methods show humanized prototypes and decisional certainty align with gender schemas: drawing test and mouse-tracking reveal gender-typed traits and decisional consistency.
ERP evidence shows low-humanness female faces increase N170 and LPP during masculinity evaluation, while low-humanness faces elicit larger P300 during femininity tasks.

TL;DR (AI Generated)

Study 1 (n = 400) revealed that higher humanness ratings predicted stronger femininity evaluations for female faces and stronger masculinity evaluations for male faces.

Study 4 (n = 25) provided electrophysiological evidence: in masculinity-evaluation tasks, low-humanness female faces elicited enhanced N170 and LPP amplitudes, indicating increased structural encoding and motivated attention.

Basic summary

Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2026 Jun 12:nsag036. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsag036. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Perceptions of humanness are deeply intertwined with social norms, yet the specific theoretical link between humanness and gender normativity, a primary form of social normativity, remains insufficiently understood. Across four studies (N = 686), we investigated whether humanized faces are implicitly processed as more gender-normative. Study 1 (n = 400) revealed that higher humanness ratings predicted stronger femininity evaluations for female faces and stronger masculinity evaluations for male faces. Study 2 (n = 161), employing a drawing projective test, demonstrated that highly humanized mental prototypes exhibited more gender-typed traits. In Study 3 (n = 92), mouse-tracking revealed that lower Maximum Deviation (MD), an indicator of greater decisional certainty, was linked to evaluations consistent with gender schemas. Study 4 (n = 25) provided electrophysiological evidence: in masculinity-evaluation tasks, low-humanness female faces elicited enhanced N170 and LPP amplitudes, indicating increased structural encoding and motivated attention. In femininity-evaluation tasks, low-humanness faces evoked larger P300, suggesting counter-stereotypic processing. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that humanness perception reinforces gender normativity, as reflected in distinct neural signatures.

PMID:42286823 | DOI:10.1093/scan/nsag036

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