What you strike me is the human tendency to mark one option as the default and the other as a special case.
However, it makes me wonder: if the person making the judgement belongs to the category commonly considered “a special case”, will they mentally mark either category as the default? Judging by myself (yes, yes, generalizing from one example), among the intersection of social partitionings that define me, I tend to skip ones where I’m in the majority category (for example, white, or specifically on LW, atheist), and in cases where I’m a minority, treat neither option as the implicit default.
As I recall, for some categories this turns out, surprisingly, not to be the case. Women are as likely as men to consider a person of unspecified gender male, for example, and blacks are as likely as whites to consider a person of unspecified color white… at least, in some contexts, for some questions, etc. (I would very much expect this to change radically depending on, for example, where the study is being performed; also I would expect it to be more true of implicit association tests than explicit ones.)
I have no citations, though, and could easily be misremembering (or remembering inconclusive studies).
What you strike me is the human tendency to mark one option as the default and the other as a special case.
However, it makes me wonder: if the person making the judgement belongs to the category commonly considered “a special case”, will they mentally mark either category as the default? Judging by myself (yes, yes, generalizing from one example), among the intersection of social partitionings that define me, I tend to skip ones where I’m in the majority category (for example, white, or specifically on LW, atheist), and in cases where I’m a minority, treat neither option as the implicit default.
Efficiency of encoding, perhaps?
As I recall, for some categories this turns out, surprisingly, not to be the case. Women are as likely as men to consider a person of unspecified gender male, for example, and blacks are as likely as whites to consider a person of unspecified color white… at least, in some contexts, for some questions, etc. (I would very much expect this to change radically depending on, for example, where the study is being performed; also I would expect it to be more true of implicit association tests than explicit ones.)
I have no citations, though, and could easily be misremembering (or remembering inconclusive studies).