.jpg/640px-Black_dog_with_white_toes_looks_up_at_the_camera_(17-08-2004).jpg)
Would
you give this dog a male name or a female name? (Wikicommons)
Apart from any cultural or nurture-related factors, maybe we're just hard-wired to associate female with 'fair'. I have a small white fuzzy dog; everybody calls him a 'she' even though he rather obviously has a penis. However, no one assumes my small black dog is a 'she', ever."
There is an assumption that white or bright is associated with female and black or dark with the male. This sensory dimension—bright to dark—is a distinctive feature of gender and gender-related actions. There is historical and anthropological evidence that the gender categories, female-male and the sensory dimension-bright to dark-are associated. Indeed, sexual dimorphism of skin colour, namely that females have a lighter skin colour than males, is well established in research outside of the psychological literature (Semin et al. 2018).
Women are fairer-skinned than men, although the difference is smaller in very fair or very dark populations and larger in medium-colored populations (Frost 2007; Madrigal and Kelly 2007; van den Berghe and Frost 1986). This sexual dimorphism is due more or less equally to differences in melanin content and hemoglobin content of the skin. Women are thus pale in comparison to men, who look browner and ruddier (Edwards and Duntley 1939; Edwards and Duntley 1949; Edwards et al. 1941.). Parallel to this sexual dimorphism, lighter skin is mentally associated with femininity across a wide range of cultures (van den Berghe and Frost 1986).
How
reflexive is this mental association? Very much so, according to a recent
series of experiments with Dutch, Portuguese, and Turkish participants. In the
first one, personal names were gender-identified faster when male names were presented
in black and female names in white than when the combinations were reversed. In
the second experiment, very briefly appearing black and white blobs had to be
classified by gender; the former were classified predominantly as male and the
latter as female. Finally, in an eye-tracking experiment, observation was
longer and fixation more frequent when a black or dark object was associated
with a male character and a white or light object with a female character
(Semin et al. 2018).
We
see similar results in two other studies: when given a word-association test,
Navajo participants perceived the color black as more potent and masculine and
the color white as more active and feminine. (Osgood 1960). In a British study,
women were asked to optimize the attractiveness of facial pictures by varying
the skin's darkness and ruddiness. They responded by making the male faces
darker and ruddier than the female faces (Carrito et al. 2016).
Hardwired or
softwired?
Is
this mental association between skin tone and gender hardwired? That
explanation is evoked at the outset of this paper, but toward the end the
authors opt for learning:
One might well ask how this differential processing is likely to come about. One possible avenue is via the critical adaptive mechanism that humans have, namely their ability to extract regularities from their complex and noisy physical and social environments. This ability to extract regularities is automatic and is referred to as 'implicit learning' (Semin et al. 2018)
The 'implicit learning' hypothesis does not explain why this mental association is influenced by the sex hormones. Some kind of hormonal input is indicated by three studies. A brain-imaging study showed a stronger neural response in women to pictures of “masculinized” male faces, and this response correlated with their estrogen levels across the menstrual cycle (Rupp et al. 2009). In a personal communication, the lead author stated that the faces had been masculinized by making them darker and more robust in shape.
In
another study, women had to choose between two facial pictures that were
identical except for a slight difference in color. When male faces were shown,
the darker one was more strongly preferred by women in the first two-thirds of
their menstrual cycle (high estrogen/progesterone ratio) than by women in the
last third (low estrogen/progesterone ratio). There was no cyclical effect if
the women were judging female faces or taking oral contraceptives (Frost 1994).
Finally,
an estrogenic influence is indicated by a study of preschool children who had
to choose between two dolls that differed slightly in skin color. Doll choice
was the same for boys and girls. Below three years of age, however, the
children who chose the darker doll had significantly more body fat than those
who chose the lighter doll (Frost 1989). In that age range, estrogen is
produced mostly by the body's fatty tissues (Baird 1976).
Perhaps
there is both hardwiring and softwiring. People learn to associate lighter skin
with women and darker skin with men. This learned mental association then
interacts in the brain with a hardwired hormonal input. But why couldn't the
mental association be hardwired as well? The mind tends to hardwire any
recurrent task, thus shortening response time and cutting out learning time.
For example, we have an innate ability to recognize faces. This is shown by
prosopagnosia, a kind of brain damage where someone may seem normal and yet be
no better at recognizing a face than any other object. At the other extreme are
“super-recognizers” who are as good at face recognition as prosopagnosics are
bad (Russell, Duchaine, and Nakayama 2009).
Then
there’s that study of preschool children. Doll choice didn’t differ between the
boys and the girls, but the children with more body fat had a stronger
preference for darker skin, like the women during the high estrogen/low
progesterone phase of their menstrual cycle. This doesn’t look like a learned
preference.
References
Baird,
D.T. (1976). Oestrogens in clinical practice. In J.A. Loraine and E. Trevor
Bell (Eds.) Hormone assays and their
clinical application, (p. 408). Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone.
Carrito,
M.L., I.M.B. dos Santos, C.E. Lefevre, R.D. Whitehead, C.F. da Silva, and D.I.
Perrett. (2016). The role of sexually dimorphic skin colour and shape in
attractiveness of male faces. Evolution
and Human Behavior 37(2): 125-33.
Edwards,
E.A., and S.Q. Duntley. (1939). The pigments and color of living human skin. American Journal of Anatomy 65(1): 1-33.
Edwards,
E.A., and S.Q. Duntley. (1949). Cutaneous vascular changes in women in
reference to the menstrual cycle and ovariectomy. American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology 57(3): 501-509.
Edwards,
E.A., J.B. Hamilton, S.Q. Duntley, and G. Hubert. (1941). Cutaneous vascular
and pigmentary changes in castrate and eunuchoid men. Endocrinology 28(1): 119-128. https://doi.org/10.1210/endo-28-1-119
Frost,
P. (1989). Human skin color: the sexual differentiation of its social
perception. Mankind Quarterly 30:
3-16.
Frost,
P. (1994b). Preference for darker faces in photographs at different phases of
the menstrual cycle: Preliminary assessment of evidence for a hormonal
relationship. Perceptual and Motor Skills
79(1): 507-14.
Frost,
P. (2007). Comment on Human skin-color sexual dimorphism: A test of the sexual
selection hypothesis. American Journal of
Physical Anthropology 133(1): 779-781.
Madrigal,
L., and W. Kelly. (2006). Human skin-color sexual dimorphism: A test of the
sexual selection hypothesis. American
Journal of Physical Anthropology 132(3): 470-482.
Osgood,
C.E. (1960). The cross-cultural generality of visual-verbal synesthetic
tendencies. Behavioral Science 5(2):
146-169.
Rupp,
H.A., T.W. James, E.D. Ketterson, D.R. Sengelaub, E. Janssen, and J.R. Heiman.
(2009). Neural activation in women in response to masculinized male faces:
mediation by hormones and psychosexual factors. Evolution and Human Behavior 30(1): 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2008.08.006
Russell,
R., B. Duchaine, and K. Nakayama. (2009). Super-recognizers: People with
extraordinary face recognition ability. Psychonomic
Bulletin & Review 16(2): 252-257.
Semin,
G.R., T. Palma, C. Acaturk, and A. Dziuba. (2018). Gender is not simply a
matter of black and white, or is it? Philosophical
Transactions of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences 373(1752):20170126
van
den Berghe, P.L., and P. Frost. (1986). Skin color preference, sexual
dimorphism and sexual selection: A case of gene-culture co-evolution? Ethnic and Racial Studies 9(1): 87-113. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.1986.9993516
