Why the bride wears white: grounding gender with brightness

Abstract

Two studies examine the grounding of gender by the alignment of the female male with the bipolar dimension of light dark (most likely due to sexual dimorphism in skin pigmentation). We hypothesized and showed that in a speeded classification task male names are processed faster when they are presented in a black typeface (Exp. 1) or a dark color (Exp. 2) than when they are presented in white or a light color, with the opposite pattern for female names. The applied relevance of these findings is investigated in study 3 where lightness and darkness of consumables are revealed to drive gender specific preferences for foods and drinks, with the lighter consumables being female and darker ones being male preferences. Study 4 shows that gender preferences for consumer goods are uniformly driven by whether the good is in black or white, the former being male and the latter being female preference. The implications of these findings are discussed for theory formation in relation to the grounding of abstract concepts and in terms of how to design targeted marketing of products.