Men over women: The social transmission of gender stereotypes through spatial elevation ☆,☆☆

Abstract

People draw from physical properties like spatial location to better understand complex concepts like power (Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010; T. W. Schubert, 2005). We examined the cultural implications of such associations for gender stereotypes. Specifically, we hypothesized that people would make location-based attributions of power and dominance when targets are situated in noisy, real-world environments (i.e., magazine pages; Study 1); that men generally appear higher than women across print media (Study 2: Content Analysis); and that this gender-location association would ultimately cause perceivers to think that men (in general) are more powerful and dominant people than are women (Study 3; meta-analysis). Results supported hypotheses and indicate that exposure to this cultural pattern in which men are higher than women (i.e., male spatial elevation) causes perceivers to endorse gender stereotypes of dominance. Accordingly, gender-location associations may account in part for the social transmission of gender stereotypes.

Full text

Running head: SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 1
Men Over Women:
The Social Transmission of Gender Stereotypes through Spatial Elevation
Sarah Ariel Lamer1 & Max Weisbuch2
1 University of Tennessee, Knoxville
2 University of Denver
Author Note
Sarah Ariel Lamer1 & Max Weisbuch2
1Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
2Department of Psychology, University of Denver
This research was supported by an NSF GRFP (DGE-1104602).
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sarah Ariel Lamer, University of
Tennessee, Austin Peay Building, Knoxville, TN 37916.
Contact: Slamer@utk.edu
Word Count: 16,653
This is a preprint of an article published in the Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002210311830307X).
Consistent with their policy, changes made during the final editing process are not
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SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 2
Abstract
People draw from physical properties like spatial location to better understand complex concepts like
power (Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010; T. W. Schubert, 2005). We examined the cultural implications of
such associations for gender stereotypes. Specifically, we hypothesized that people would make location-
based attributions of power and dominance when targets are situated in noisy, real-world environments
(i.e., magazine pages; Study 1); that men generally appear higher than women across print media (Study
2: Content Analysis); and that this gender-location association would ultimately cause perceivers to think
that men (in general) are more powerful and dominant people than are women (Study 3; meta-analysis).
Results supported hypotheses and indicate that exposure to this cultural pattern in which men are higher
than women (i.e., male spatial elevation) causes perceivers to endorse gender stereotypes of dominance.
Accordingly, gender-location associations may account in part for the social transmission of gender
stereotypes.
Keywords: conceptual metaphor theory; ecological theory; social perception; gender stereotypes; media;
culture

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 3
“Adler observes that the notions of high and low have great importance…between boys, it is frequently a
pretext or challenge. The little girl, to whom exploits are forbidden and who sits under a tree or by a cliff
and sees the triumphant boys above her, feels herself, body and soul, inferior.”
-Simone de Beauvoir, 1949
In the opening quote, de Beauvoir relates high and low spatial locations to triumph and
inferiority, respectively. In doing so, she used metaphor to illustrate one feature of traditional gender
roles: girls and women are expected to behave with less dominance and power than boys and men.
Metaphors are useful linguistic devices but several theories in cognitive linguistics suggest that metaphors
also reflect how humans think. The most influential of these is Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT;
Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), which begins with the idea that people form cognitive representations of the
physical world based on their daily interactions with it. Critically, people use these concrete source
concepts (e.g., height, heaviness, warmth) to understand abstract target concepts (e.g., power, importance,
friendliness; Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010). For example, people may think of high versus low spatial
position as a means of understanding the target concept of power or dominance (Lu, Schubert, & Zhu,
2017; T. W. Schubert, 2005; Von Hecker, Klauer, & Sankaran, 2013). Similarly, people may think of
heavy versus light weight as a means of understanding the target concept of “importance” (Djordjevic &
IJzerman, 2015; Schneider, Rutjens, Jostmann, & Lakens, 2011), or may think of warm versus cold
sensation to help them understand the concept of friendliness (Williams & Bargh, 2008). These cognitive
mappings are metaphorical in that the source and target concepts are semantically dissimilar. For
example, spatial position regards the three dimensions of physical space whereas power and dominance
regards social relationships, yet there is evidence that concepts of vertical space influence how people
think about power.
Social psychologists have extended CMT by focusing on how metaphorical cognitive mappings
shape social judgments. Specifically, the social psychological approach emphasizes that people draw from

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 4
source concept(s) to reason about, interpret, and evaluate information related to target concepts (Landau
et al., 2010). For example, there is evidence that the location of a person on the vertical plane can shape
perceivers’ judgments of that person’s power and dominance, goodness, morality, and religiosity
(Chasteen, Burdzy, & Pratt, 2010; Holmgren, Isager, & Schubert, 2018; Lu et al., 2017; Meier, Hauser,
Robinson, Friesen, & Schjeldahl, 2007; Meier & Robinson, 2004, 2006). We refer to the relationship
between spatial location and social concepts as social-spatial associations.
We here examine the relationship between social-spatial associations and stereotypes. In so
doing, we extend research on social-spatial associations in three ways. First, we tested how spatial
location informs social judgment when stimuli are situated in real social environments. Specifically, and
drawing from classic theories of perception (J. J. Gibson, 1979; McArthur & Baron, 1983) and judgment
(Brunswik, 1949, 1955; Gigerenzer, 2004; Todd & Gigerenzer, 2000), we argue that the richness and
complexity of real environments demands specific perceptual and cognitive processes that enable
perceivers to navigate and learn from those environments. For example, experiments that present one
word (“teacher”) above another (“pupil”) on an otherwise bare computer screen are valuable in isolating
the psychological effects of location from other potential influences on social judgment, but in so doing
potentially exaggerate those effects. Real physical environments include many perceptual and social
variables that shape social judgment, and verticality may have little impact among these many variables.
Conversely, if people must draw from representations of spatial location to make judgments of power,
then verticality may influence judgments of power amidst many other visible social variables. In Study 1,
we digitally manipulated the location of images in a sample of American magazine pages and measured
participants’ judgments of the pictured individuals.
In Studies 2 and 3, we examined the role of social-spatial associations in reinforcing gender
stereotypes. Specifically, gender stereotypes hold that men are more powerful and dominant than women
(Bailey & Kelly, 2015; Hoyt & Burnette, 2013; Kay et al., 2009; Prentice & Carranza, 2002). We
hypothesized that this gender-based power difference would be reflected in the vertical locations of
culturally-prevalent images (i.e., images seen by a large population). In Study 2, we collected a

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 5
representative sample of pages from popular magazines and examined whether culturally-prevalent
images of men were located higher than images of women. In Study 3, we tested the hypothesis that
seeing men in high locations and women in low locations would cause participants to inflate their
estimates of differences in power between women and men.
Do People Draw Inferences About Power Based on Vertical Location?
Conceptual Metaphor Theory has important implications for scientific understanding of social
cognition (e.g., Landau et al., 2010) but research inspired by this theory is not without controversy
(Ashton, Pilkington, & Lee, 2014; Hill & Lapsley, 2009; IJzerman & Koole, 2011; Lee & Schwarz, 2012;
L. Schubert, Schubert, & Topolinski, 2013). For example, Conceptual Metaphor Theory suggests that the
cognitive structure of concrete concepts in memory shapes the cognitive structure of abstract concepts;
some scholars have thus argued that Conceptual Metaphor Theory exclusively postulates influences of
source concept activation on judgments of target concepts (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Landau et al., 2010;
Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009). Conversely, other theories posit bidirectional influences. For example,
one alternative theory suggests that people learn simple associations between physical properties and
abstract concepts and these simple associations thus allow for bidirectional influences, such that the
activation of target concepts can influence judgments of source concepts. For example, children may learn
to associate location with power because their parents and other authority figures are high in space (T. W.
Schubert, 2005). There is compelling evidence for such bidirectional influences (Lakens, Semin, &
Foroni, 2011; Lee & Schwarz, 2010, 2012; Meier & Robinson, 2004; Zhang, Zuo, Erskine, & Hu, 2016;
Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008; Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006), but not all scholars agree such evidence is
inconsistent with Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Landau, Keefer, & Meier, 2011).
For example, Lee and Schwarz (2012) draw a distinction between metaphorical structure and
metaphorical processing. They argue, as does CMT, that people draw from their understanding of
concrete concepts to understand abstract concepts, and therefore develop cognitive mappings between
concrete and abstract concepts. Extending CMT, Lee and Schwarz then argue that once the concrete-
abstract mapping has been established, bi-directional influences on processing can emerge. Specifically,

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 6
an abstract concept can exert a “top-down” influence on human perception of source concepts just as
current needs, stereotypes, and cultural knowledge exert such influence on human perception of elemental
concepts (e.g., size).
Debates about the directionality of influence in metaphor effects are but one issue tackled by
different social-cognitive theories. Other points of disagreement include the role of embodied processes in
metaphorical influences, the mechanisms involved in how people learn concrete-abstract mappings, and
the extent to which simpler, non-metaphorical factors can explain the existing evidence (IJzerman &
Koole, 2011; McGlone, 2007). Yet one point of agreement among most theories is that they predict
concrete-to-abstract effects: cognitive representations of concrete concepts (e.g., physical space) can
influence how perceivers judge stimuli on semantically-distant abstract concepts (e.g., power; Landau et
al., 2011). Our goal is not to distinguish among social-cognitive theories but to instead identify the
generalizability of a phenomenon predicted by most of these theories: location of a stimulus on the
vertical plane influences perceivers’ abstract judgments of that stimulus. Specifically, we aim to identify
the generalizability of such effects.
Questions about the generalizability of conceptual metaphor effects (Citron & Goldberg, 2014;
IJzerman & Koole, 2011; Klein et al., 2018; Lakens et al., 2011; McGlone, 2007) have generally centered
on whether the findings of specific studies generalize to other participant samples. In our view, however,
any given finding should be considered within the broader network of research findings on individual
metaphor effects. With respect to social-spatial associations, evidence from several different paradigms
suggests that people associate conceptions of power with the vertical plane. For example, words related to
power (e.g., teacher, master) were identified as “powerful” more quickly when they were located high
(than low) in space (T. W. Schubert, 2005; Wu et al., 2016). In other studies, people were judged to be
especially dominant when placed up on a pedestal (Schwartz, Tesser, & Powell, 1982), powerful animals
were judged to be more dominant and higher in status when placed high on a screen (T. W. Schubert,
2005), CEOs were judged to be more dominant and powerful when placed higher in space than their
subordinates (Giessner & Schubert, 2007), and the high or low status of exemplars were judged more

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 7
quickly and accurately when located in congruent vertical locations (i.e., high status exemplars located
higher than low status exemplars (Von Hecker et al., 2013). Conversely, in one Many Labs replication
study (in which each participant completes many studies in a single session), judgments of CEOs’
dominance and power were not influenced by the vertical locations of those CEOs (Klein et al., 2018;
unlike Geissner & Schubert, 2007). Accordingly, there may be variability across samples in the extent to
which participants attribute power to CEOs from locations in organizational charts. In our view, however,
the broader network of findings currently support the theory that people judge things to be more powerful
when those things appear high versus low on the vertical plane.
Exact study replications across participant samples provide tests for one specific form of
generalization—generalization across participant samples. However, when issues of generalizability are
important (see Mook, 1983), those issues are not limited to generalizability among participant samples.
For example, Brunswik (Brunswik, 1949, 1955; Brunswik & Kamiya, 1953), Campbell and Stanley
(1963), and others (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996; Hursch, Hammond, & Hursch, 1964; McArthur &
Baron, 1983) argue that the scientific generalizability of study findings critically depends on the extent to
which study procedures and materials represent what people typically encounter in their lives. Ecological
theories of perception (Brunswik, 1955; E. J. Gibson & Pick, 2000; J. J. Gibson, 1979; McArthur &
Baron, 1983; Tolman & Brunswik, 1935) are especially relevant to the current work. These theories
emphasize that people typically encounter stimuli against a rich backdrop of visual and social noise, and
that a crucial task for perception is to identify the “distal” (often, abstract) characteristics of a stimulus
from amidst this noise. For example, perceivers may use the concrete characteristic of spatial location to
evaluate the extent to which a stimulus person is powerful and dominant but only when other visible cues
to power (e.g., clothing, scene, nonverbal posture) are held constant. For example, spatial location may
have little or no influence on social judgments in the social contexts perceivers typically encounter, as
target persons in these contexts vary in the clothes they wear, the scenes in which they are situated, and in
the body postures and other visible cues to power and dominance that they exhibit.

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 8
It is also possible that spatial location does influence power judgments in noisy and frequently
encountered visual environments. According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory and extensions of it,
thinking about power requires perceivers to bring to mind concepts of spatial location so whenever people
judge others’ power they may draw from the spatial location of a stimulus—even when faced the stimulus
is located in a noisy and rich complexity of the environment: simply bringing power concepts to mind
during judgment may prioritize the perception and use of spatial parameters in perception. Second, the
balance of evidence suggests that the influence of spatial location on power judgments is robust to
different paradigms and stimuli. In Study 1, we therefore examined whether vertical location of a person
would influence judgments of that person’s power amidst the visual and social complexity typical of
social contexts.
Social-Spatial Associations: Conduits for Cultural Reinforcement?
To the extent that the effects of spatial location on social judgment generalize to typical and
complex social environments, they may have important downstream consequences for how those
environments shape social cognition. Typical social environments are those that many people frequently
encounter. Accordingly, the composition of typical environments may exert culturally-widespread
influences on perceivers’ beliefs. For example, to the extent that perceivers encode women’s and men’s
locations in typical environments, they may incidentally activate and encode the corresponding power
inference along with other encoded information (e.g., perceived gender). Paired encoding of power and
social category (e.g., gender) may strengthen or weaken perceivers’ beliefs about the power and
dominance of those social categories (e.g., women vs. men).
People have a variety of beliefs associated with power, including beliefs about who has power.
For example, people believe that supervisors and men are more powerful than interns and women,
respectively. These beliefs may be represented in human memory, such as stereotypes that men are more
powerful and have more dominant personalities than women (Bailey & Kelly, 2015; Eckes, 2002; Fiske,
Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002; Prentice & Carranza, 2002; Rudman & Glick, 2001; Rudman, Greenwald, &
McGhee, 2001; Spence & Buckner, 2000). We pursued the hypothesis that social environments may

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 9
reinforce stereotypes of power through social-spatial associations. Specifically, we examined if seeing
covariation between gender and spatial location would cause perceivers to endorse gender stereotypes of
power.
Social construction of gender stereotypes. Feminist theorists have frequently argued that
people’s gender stereotypes reflect what they have learned from the social environment, rather than from
inherent beliefs about differences between women and men (de Beauvoir, 1949; Eagly & Karau, 2002;
Eagly & Steffen, 1984; Friedan, 1963; Steinem, 1983; Wollstonecraft, 1792). For example, Social Role
Theory suggests that perceivers learn that women are nurturing because perceivers more frequently
encounter women than men in nurturing roles (e.g., “housewife”, “maid”; Eagly & Steffen, 1984). In this
way, perceivers learn gender stereotypes through encounters with the social environment. Social Role
Theory and other theories that regard the social construction of gender roles are built, in part, on more
basic assumptions about how people process social information. For example, Social Role Theory
assumes that people draw dispositional inferences about women and men from their role-driven behavior
and in this way the theory builds on well-supported assumptions about social information processing (i.e.,
correspondence bias; Wood & Eagly, 2012) to explain how social environments reinforce gender
stereotypes.
We take a similar approach here. Basic assumptions about how people use conceptual metaphor
in social information processing may help to explain how social environments reinforce gender
stereotypes of power. To the extent that people conceptualize power by their understanding of spatial
locations, they may conceptualize gender stereotypes of power by their understanding of where women
and men are typically located in space. Accordingly, people may believe that men are more powerful than
women to the extent that their social environments typically locate men higher than women. We
hypothesized that gender stereotypes of power would be reflected in the vertical plane of common social
environments (i.e., in visual media; Hypothesis 2), and would be reinforced via exposure to those
environments (Hypothesis 3).

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 10
Do typical environments include covariation between gender and vertical location?
Hypothesis 2 is not a direct test of Conceptual Metaphor Theory per se, but it was motivated by that
theory. Specifically, CMT assumes that the way the human mind structures and processes information
influences a wide range of behaviors, such as the phrases we use in speech and the environments that we
create for ourselves. This idea is central to Conceptual Metaphor Theory analyses of language, which
suggest that the way source-targets are mapped in human memory is cause—not consequent—of common
linguistic metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Landau et al., 2010). Yet source-target concept
associations in human memory should not only be reflected in the language we use but also in the
physical properties of the environments we construct (e.g., buildings, art, mass media). Accordingly,
people may place images of men higher in space than images of women because such spatial selections
reflect conceptual mappings of power onto space.
Conceptual Metaphor Theory presents only one of several mechanisms that may cause men to be
located higher than women in culturally-distributed visual media. For example, people perceive more
masculinity in a face when it has a high (vs. low) location (Lamer, Weisbuch, & Sweeny, 2017). To the
extent that people prefer scenes that are familiar or prototypical (Reber, Winkielman, & Schwarz, 1998;
Schnall & Clore, 2004a; Zitek & Tiedens, 2012), they may place images of men higher in space than
images of women. Hence, metaphor may be unnecessary to explain any relationship between a person’s
gender and their spatial location in common environments. We do not aim here to disentangle the
processes that would cause men to be located higher in space than women in common visual media—we
instead focused on the hypothesis that an environmental association between the vertical plane and gender
is prevalent in American visual media (Hypothesis 2).
Do gender stereotypes draw from social-spatial associations? Hypothesis 3 suggests that
observing covariation between vertical position and gender reinforces the belief that men are more
powerful and dominant than women. This effect should only occur to the extent that perceivers map their
concepts of power onto the semantically-distant concept of spatial location. Nonetheless, the effect could
occur through at least two distinct but not mutually exclusive routes. First, covariation between verticality

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 11
and gender may exert its effects on perceivers as they retrieve information about the power/dominance of
women and men: when making explicit judgments about the power and dominance of women (or men),
people may recruit from their spatial representations of women (or men). To the extent perceivers have
recently seen men higher in space than women, they would recruit from spatial representations that cause
them to think that men are more powerful than women.
A second possibility is that people incidentally encode information about a woman or man’s
power during the process of encoding a person’s spatial location. This exemplar-based information may
then generalize to representations of women and men in general. To the extent that seeing people in high
or low spatial positions causes perceivers to immediately activate concepts of high or low power,
respectively (for an analogous analysis of cleanliness and morality, see Lee & Schwarz, 2012), repeatedly
seeing men high in space may cause perceivers to strengthen their cognitive association between men and
power. At the time of judgment, this changed representation is retrieved. Other pathways are possible as
well but the main point for our purposes is that each of these speculative mechanisms requires the
perceiver to map gendered concepts of power onto gendered concepts of verticality. This effect should be
considered metaphorical to the extent that concepts of power and location are semantically-distant
(Landau et al., 2011). More generally, we predicted that seeing men in high spatial locations and women
in low spatial locations (vs. the opposite) would cause perceivers to more strongly endorse the view that
men are more powerful and have more dominant dispositions than women (Hypothesis 3).
Cultural Snapshots
We hypothesized that (1) perceivers draw inferences of power from a person’s location in the
complex noise of typical social environments, that (2) a person’s location and gender covary in typical
social environments, and that (3) perceiving such covariation causes perceivers to strengthen their gender
stereotypes of power. Collectively, these three hypotheses represent our proposal that gender stereotypes
are reinforced through the vertical plane of culturally-distributed visual media. Such effects would have
widespread implications for how gender stereotypes are maintained within a widely-distributed
population. Tests of these hypotheses require a method that allows generalization from the stimulus

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 12
sample to culturally-distributed visual environments—put differently, the stimulus sample should be
representative of what a large population frequently encounters.
For perceivers to learn from patterns of spatial elevation as we have hypothesized in Hypothesis 3
especially, they must engage cognitive operations that have not been previously examined in the context
of social-spatial associations. First, there is little evidence that the spatial locations of individual people
can influence stereotypes about social categories. Evidence to date suggests that social-spatial
associations influence social judgment through short-term memory: activation of a concrete concept
influences perceivers’ abstract evaluation of an exemplar (Giessner, Ryan, Schubert, & van Quaquebeke,
2011; Sanna, Chang, Miceli, & Lundberg, 2011; T. W. Schubert, 2005; Wu et al., 2016). Conversely, we
have argued that repeated pairings of men (women) with high (low) spatial position may influence
cognitive representations of gender stereotypes. Stereotypes are presumably stored in long-term memory
(Hilton & von Hippel, 1996; Sherman, 1996) and as described above, so social-spatial associations must
influence these stereotypes by altering how information about spatial location is encoded in memory (e.g.,
as power) or by altering long-term memory representations of men’s and women’s typical locations. In
either case, support for Hypothesis 3 would suggest that social-spatial associations influence long-term
memory representations.
Second, information about gender and spatial location (even if encoded with respect to power, see
above) must accumulate over time because covariation can only be observed across occurrences. Put
differently, support for Hypothesis 3 should only emerge if perceivers track covariation of gender and
location over time. Theories of perception and judgment in the ecological tradition (Brunswik, 1956;
Bullock & Todd, 1999; J. J. Gibson, 1979; Gigerenzer, 2004; Hammond & Stewart, 2001; McArthur &
Baron, 1983) suggest that perceivers should indeed track covariation, and these theories provide a
framework to understand how people change their beliefs in response to such covariation. A common
tenet among these theories is that human minds adapt to the complex statistical structure of their
environments. Such adaptation is not simple, since people live in uncertain environments. When people
see a woman or man, they see them amidst colors, textures, edges, objects, buildings, symbols, weather,

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 13
and so on. The nearly infinite array of cues have certain probabilistic associations with each other (Hursch
et al., 1964), with each of many distal variables (Tolman & Brunswik, 1935), and with gender. For
example, we’ve suggested that people learn about the abstract traits (i.e., power) of women and men by
perceiving covariation between gender and concrete vertical location. Yet the locations of women and
men along the vertical plane may be noticed but not encoded into long-term memory, especially when
locations must be encoded amidst the many other cues, perceptual features, and objects in a scene.
Learning gender-location associations thus requires that people track the specific relationship between
gender and location (or power implied by location) across time and different types of noisy scenes.
Accordingly, in the current work, we examine if people learn about the abstract traits of men and women
from gender-location covariation across the complex, rich, and interrelated social scenes that people
frequently encounter. Representative design is necessary for testing this idea.
Representative design is critical to our goals in another way: correlations between features may
depend on the presence or absence of still other features. For example, covariation may emerge between
gender and verbal interruptions, such that women are interrupted more often than men, but only in the
context of certain other features (e.g., conference tables, formal clothing, outside the home). Conversely,
a correlation of features may also emerge across contexts. The persistence of covarying features across
domains increases the number of people exposed to them, and the frequency with which any single person
sees these features together (assuming each person frequents different social contexts). For example, men
tend to be paid more than women, regardless of the domain ( e.g., nursing, teaching, business; Hegewisch,
Williams, & Harbin, 2012). Hence, in the current work, we measure genders and locations in oft-
encountered social scenes, but we also measure features which may potentially moderate the association
between gender and location.
We use a methodology termed cultural snapshots (Pauker, Brey, Lamer, & Weisbuch, 2019;
Weisbuch, Lamer, Treinen, & Pauker, 2017) to examine (a) if the relationship between vertical location
and gender constitutes a social pattern that appears across social scenes and (b) if this social pattern is a
plausible cause of widespread gender stereotypes. Because we examine social patterns across

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 14
environments that are encountered by widely-distributed population, we refer to them as cultural patterns
(see Weisbuch et al., 2017). The cultural snapshots methodology requires us to use identical materials to
identify and manipulate these cultural patterns in real social scenes, so as to achieve truly representative
design. Cultural snapshots are recordings drawn from scenes that are seen repeatedly by many people in
their day-to-day lives, such as television programs, urban street corners, or magazine pages. For example,
in 2014, US adults reported reading (on median) 7.3 magazine issues per month. There are nearly 300
million magazine subscriptions in the US alone and on average, people read about half of the pages in a
magazine (Consumer magazines, 2014; Magazine release standards, 2011; Nielsen, 2015).
1
Accordingly,
any pattern that appears across the pages of all or most magazines is likely to be seen several hundred
times monthly (or more) by many Americans. This fact underscores the practical significance of results
from the experimental studies we report below, where we examine how limited exposure to gendered
vertical positioning in magazine pages influences participants’ gender stereotypes. This experimental
model exposes people to a very small dose of a pattern that they more frequently encounter in daily life.
Accordingly, even small statistical effects in the experimental model reflect practically-meaningful effects
on cognition.
STUDY 1
Study 1 examined the causal influence of vertical space in magazines on impressions of social
power. Although prior research has established that people seem to associate vertical space with power
(e.g., T. W. Schubert, 2005; Schwartz et al., 1982; Von Hecker et al., 2013), it is not clear that vertical
space is utilized by perceivers to infer power in natural scenes. When placed amidst the perceptual and
social noise of real images, and real magazine pages, vertical position may fail to influence inferences of
power. Perceivers may neglect vertical space in favor of other, more obvious cues to power, such as
work-role or posture. Although vertical location is a necessary feature of any magazine image, it is not
clear that perceivers utilize this cue in drawing impressions of the women and men in those noisy images.
1
We surveyed 300 Mechanical Turk workers to ask about the percentage of a magazine’s pages that they looked at
after picking it up (M=46% of pages).

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 15
In Study 1, we also examined the role of absolute spatial location in impression formation. Most
previous studies examining vertical spatial cues measure attributions of power and dominance for one
target placed high or low in relation to another target (e.g., Schubert, 2005). Given that magazine pages
far more often include a single image than multiple images (see Footnote 5), it was important to test if
vertical spatial location of a single target would sufficiently influence impressions of power. Thus, we
here examined the extent to which individual women and men pictured in magazines are believed to have
more power when they are depicted high versus low on a page.
Methods
Stimuli
We used pages from three popular US magazines (Time, People, and National Geographic: total
circulation ≈ 66 million in 2018) to generate a set of experimental stimuli in which women and men are
depicted high or low on the page. One way to do so would be to simply sample magazine images
featuring a perceived woman or man. However, that strategy introduces potential confounds—for
example, we might unintentionally select more images of women depicted in work roles (e.g., teaching a
class) low (vs. high) in space and/or more images of men depicted in work roles high (vs. low) in space.
To avoid these and other possible confounds, we collected real magazine images and edited each page to
create a pair of stimuli.
Specifically, we selected
84 pages (42 women, 42
men) from 3 magazines
(i.e., Time, National
Geographic, and People).
We then created two
versions of each page by
relocating the image to a
high position or to a low
Figure 1. Example of page edited to have target low or high on the page.
Figure 2.Example of stimuli edited for male spatial elevation
condition (left) and female spatial elevation condition (right).

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 16
position. Each pair was thus identical aside from whether the image on the page was placed in a high or
low spatial location (see Figure 1).
Pages were selected to ensure that images of women and men were well-matched on race, age,
emotion, posture, frequency in work roles, page type, horizontal placement, and image size. Accordingly,
we conducted a series of chi-square and independent samples t-tests to confirm similarity across pages
featuring women versus men.
2
As intended, female and male targets in the selected magazine pages were
of similar perceived race, Χ2(1, N=90)=.05, p=.822; perceived age, Χ2(3, N=90)=3.15, p=.369; displayed
similar affective valence, t(88)=.49, p=.624; displayed similar posture (standing vs.
sitting/kneeling/laying vs. unclear), Χ2(2, N=90)=2.27, p=.322; were depicted in work roles with similar
frequency, Χ2(1, N=90)=.74, p=.389; and were depicted in advertisements and stories with similar
frequency, Χ2(1, N=90)=.19, p=.664. Women and men were also placed equidistant from the left edge of
the page, t(88)=.42, p=.677; and took up similar area on the pages, t(88)=.08, p=.936.
From these 168 images, we created two counterbalanced conditions each with an equal number of
high and low images of women and men. Each counterbalancing condition included the same 84
magazine pages, with 42 pages with images of women and 42 pages with images of men. Thus, each
image was presented in the high position in one condition and in the low position in the other condition.
Neither condition included systematic covariation between gender and vertical position. In summary, the
experimental manipulation of spatial elevation included two counterbalancing conditions with identical
image content but for the vertical location of each target.
Participant Coders
Coders were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and were paid for their participation. The
study was approved by the institutional review board at the University of Denver. The experiment was
conducted through Qualtrics® software. The sample consisted of 205 participant coders (51% women),
2
There were 4 pages that inadvertently featured more than 1 target. Therefore, analyses were conducted on all 90
targets (n of Women=45) across the 84 pages.

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 17
including 158 White, 18 Black, 10 Latina(o), 17 Asian, 1 Native American, and 1 mixed-race participants
ranging in age from 18-82.
Procedure
Participant coders were randomly assigned to see one of two counterbalancing conditions and to
one of two rating questions. Each image was presented for 5 seconds and was replaced by the rating
question. By virtue of random assignment, coders either indicated the degree to which “this person has
power and status” or the degree to which “this person has a dominant personality” (1, Not at all, to 7,
Extremely). There were between 48 and 54 coders in each condition. We report all measures,
manipulations, and exclusions for this study.
Results
Cross-classified mixed models were estimated to examine whether the vertical location of the
target ratings influenced perceived power, status, and dominance. Mixed models were estimated in R (R
Core Team, 2017) with the lme4 package (Bates, Maechler, Bolker, & Walker, 2015) using Satterthwaite
approximate degrees of freedom (i.e., lmerTest; Kuznetsova, Brockhoff, & Christensen, 2017).
3
Ratings
were analyzed as a function of target gender (woman (1) vs. man (-1); contrast-coded), target location
(high (1) vs. low (-1); contrast-coded), rating type (dominance (1) vs. power (-1); contrast-coded), and all
possible interactions. Random intercepts were included in the model.
4
The predicted effect of target
location was significant, b=.04, se=.01, t(16840)=4.26, p<.001, such that targets were rated as more
dominant and powerful when their image appeared high in space (M=4.26, SD=1.00) than when their
image appeared low in space (M=4.17, SD=.99). There was a trending effect of gender, b=-.17, se=.11,
t(82.00)=-1.55, p=.125, such that men (M=4.39, SD=.99) were regarded as more powerful and dominant
3
Significance testing with mixed effects models can be calculated several different ways. In this case, we estimated
degrees of freedom using Satterthwaite’s procedures which are based on the number of participants rather than
groups (Satterthwaite, 1946). Degrees of freedom may vary substantially within the same model based on which
effect is evaluated. The Satterthwaite method has demonstrated reliability in mixed effects models with sufficient
sample sizes and low Type I error rates (Manor & Zucker, 2004). See Kuznetsova, Brockhoff, and Christensen
(2017) for more information on the implementation of this estimation procedure in R.
4
Including random slopes exceeded what the data could reliably estimate in Studies 1 and 2. We therefore report all
models with random intercepts.

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 18
than women (M=4.05, SD=.98). We did not observe a significant interaction between gender and location,
b=.01, se=.01, t(16840)=.50, p=.620, suggesting that the effect of location on perceived power was
similar for women and men. There was also a large and significant effect of rating type, b=-.22, se=.05,
t(202.00)=-4.48, p<.001, such that ratings of dominance were higher (M=4.44, SD=.91) than ratings of
power and status (M=4.00, SD=1.16). There was an interaction of target gender and rating type, b=-.02,
se=.01, t(16840)=-2.00, p=.046, such that men, b=-.40, se=.10, t(201.99)=-4.07, p<.001, and women, b=-
.48, se=.11, t(202.00)=-4.51, p<.001, were rated as higher on dominance than power, though this effect
was larger for women than men. Finally, there was a marginal interaction of target location and rating
type, b=.02, se=.01, t(16840)=1.93, p=.054, such that targets were rated as significantly more powerful,
b=.06, se=.01, t(8379)=4.55, p<.001, and non-significantly more dominant, b=.02, se=.01, t(8382)=1.61,
p=.107, when located high (power: M=4.06, SD=1.16; dominance: M=4.46, SD=.93) than low (power:
M=3.93, SD=1.17; dominance: M=4.41, SD=.90) on the pages.
We conducted an additional analysis to examine participant gender as a moderator.
5
Ratings
were analyzed as a function of target gender (woman (1) vs. man (-1); contrast-coded), target location
(high (1) vs. low (-1); contrast-coded), participant gender (same as target on page (1) vs. different than
target on page (-1); contrast-coded), and all possible interactions. The predicted effect of target location
remained significant, b=.04, se=.01, t(16760)=4.24, p<.001, such that targets were rated as more
dominant and powerful when their images appeared high in space than when their image appeared low in
space. The only other effect to emerge was a two-way interaction of target location and participant
gender, b=.02, se=.01, t(16760)=1.98, p=.048, such that the effect of vertical location on power and
dominance ratings was larger when people rated targets of the same gender (b=.06, se=.01, t(8239)=4.40,
p<.001) than of the other gender (b=.02, se=.01, t(8240)=1.63, p=.104). The three-way interaction of
target location, participant gender, and target gender was not significant (b=-.005, se=.01, t(16760)=-.46,
5
One participant who identified as gender non-conforming was removed from these analyses.

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 19
p=.645) suggesting that the verticality effect was similar for female and male participants’ ratings of
women and men on the pages.
Discussion
Perceivers attributed more power to individuals when those individuals were depicted high
(versus low) in magazine pages. Thus, even amidst the considerable visual and social noise that exists
within magazine pages and images, perceivers utilized vertical position to draw abstract inferences of
power. Additionally, the effect of vertical spatial cues on perceptions of power was present even though
only a single target appeared on each page. The vertical position of an image influenced perceivers’
individual-level power attributions, and equally for images of women and images of men. An alternative
hypothesis may have been that vertical location would only impact ratings of men because masculinity is
traditionally associated with power and dominance (Hoyt & Burnette, 2013; Rudman & Glick, 2001).
However, given evidence that manipulations of power and status impact perceptions of both women and
men (Eagly & Steffen, 1984; Schmid Mast, 2010), we expected a main effect and we saw no evidence of
a significant interaction. This study was especially important in that it provides support for the idea that—
with images prevalent in mass media wherein a single person frequently appears—individuals presented
higher in space are attributed greater power (Schubert, 2005). This study suggests that social-spatial
associations influence perceptions of power independent of target gender. This is consistent with the
expectation, drawn from CMT, that vertical location would be important to evaluating an individual’s
power even when those individuals are located in rich and noisy social environments. Furthermore,
inferences of power were based on absolute vertical location suggesting that these effects may derive
from more complex abstract associations between vertical location and power than previously thought
(see General Discussion for more on this).
STUDY 2
To identify cultural patterns (social patterns seen repeatedly by many people), we coded a large,
representative sample of magazine pages. Years ago, Brunswik and Kamiya (1953) argued that images in
popular magazines provide a convenient and representative sample of scenes from the universe of

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 20
conditions to which people are often exposed. Even with regular access to the internet, the average US
consumer reports reading magazines for about 18 minutes every day. In fact, 56% of the population report
having read a print version of a magazine in the past week, and 92% of Americans aged 18 or older report
regularly reading or looking through magazines (Magazine release standards, 2011; US Media Audience
Demographics, 4th Annual Edition, 2017; Rosenstiel & Mitchell, 2012; Zenith, 2016). We used pre-
determined rules to sample pages from popular magazines targeting a range of audiences. For each page,
we measured and coded a variety of variables for the target person, the target image, and the page itself.
We hypothesized that, on average, images of women would be placed lower than images of men.
Furthermore, we examined whether this pattern would arise across magazines targeted at different
audiences and across different contexts, such as those associated with perceived race, work role (yes or
no), perceived emotion expression, vertical posture (standing or not), page type (ad or story), and the
section of the magazine.
Methods
Magazine Selection
To select magazines, we limited our search to the 50 most widely-circulated US magazines in
2011. We eliminated magazines without a high availability of human images (e.g., we excluded Better
Homes & Gardens), with age restrictions on subscriptions (e.g., we excluded AARP The Magazine), and
without national American distribution (e.g., we excluded AAA Going Places, which is distributed in only
7 states). We categorized the remaining magazines based on readership: magazines with primarily female
readership (i.e., greater than 65% of readers were women), magazines with primarily male readership
(i.e., greater than 65% of readers were men), and magazines with a relatively even distribution (i.e.,
between 35% and 65% of readers were women/men). Within each readership category, magazines were
chosen from various genres (e.g., lifestyle, celebrity news, business) to ensure breadth. Thus, a selection
of magazines with primary female readership (Oprah, Cosmopolitan, Parenting, People, and US Weekly),
magazines with primarily male readership (Game Informer, Maxim, and Sports Illustrated), and general
interest magazines (Entertainment Weekly, Money, National Geographic, and Time) were selected. We

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 21
would expect findings from this broad sample of magazines to therefore generalize to the population of
popular American magazines.
Page and Issue Sampling
Time of sample. A complete year of magazines (2011) was selected for measurement. By using
an entire year, we were able to avoid season-specific or magazine issue-specific phenomena while also
collecting a large sample of images.
Issue sampling. Pages were sampled from the 12 above magazines using pre-determined rules.
Six issues were selected (every other month) from each of the 12 magazines. Whether the even or odd
months were selected was counterbalanced by magazine. If the magazine was weekly, only one issue was
selected from any given month to equate the sampling process for the monthly magazines; in this case, the
issue was randomly selected. The length of each issue ranged from 60 pages (e.g., Entertainment Weekly,
Sports Illustrated) to 230 pages (e.g., Cosmopolitan, Oprah).
Page sampling. Each issue was then divided into five equal sections by page number to ensure
that neither early nor late pages were oversampled and to examine any gender-location correlations across
the magazine (i.e., whether gender-space correlations were smaller or larger depending whether the image
appeared earlier or later in the magazine).
6
For example, if the January edition of Oprah had 150 pages,
the magazine was split into five equal sections of 30 pages each (i.e., pages 1-30, pages 31-60, and so on).
Within each section, a pair of pages was sampled. We sampled the first page on which a single image of a
woman was shown and the first page on which a single image of a man was shown. If both images (i.e.,
woman and man) did not exist within a given section, we did not take measurements from that section for
6
A pretest on a randomly-selected 10% of magazine pages revealed that 72% of pages with images had only one
image and 73% of images included a single person. The vast majority of images and pages thus contained a single
person, which was fortunate for representative sampling purposes, as this type of image is free from factors that
could interfere with data interpretation. For example, multiple-person images include both mixed-gender and same-
gender groups (which may differ in their depiction), include anywhere from 2 to dozens of people (which
women/men to measure?), and multiple-image pages introduce dependence (spatial placement of one person
depends on other images and other people in the image). The year-long sample of magazine issues provided a large
enough database of images for us to isolate the relationship between spatial location and individual gender, exclude
the minority of pages with images of multiple people, and avoid some interpretive issues associated with
dependence.

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 22
either gender. Instead, another issue from the year 2011 was selected and both images were measured
from the same section of that issue. For some magazines (e.g., Sports Illustrated, US Weekly), issues were
exhausted before the quota of measurements could be filled (see Results for detailed information on the
magazine sample).
Measurement of Location
Spatial elevation in magazines was measured in several ways. First, overall vertical location of a
woman or a man on a page was measured in millimeters as the distance from the top of the page to the
vertical center of the pictured person. The vertical center of the person was defined as half the distance
from the top of the body (typically top of the head) to the bottom of the body (often the feet). Given
variation in page dimensions among different magazines, overall vertical location is expressed as a
proportion of page length. For example, a score of .47 would indicate that the target person is located a
little less than halfway down the page from the top. This measure corresponds to the position of a woman
or a man on a magazine page as a whole.
We also sought to examine the extent to which spatial elevation is reflected in (a) the position of
an image on the page and/or (b) the position of a target person within an image. One or both may
contribute to a gender-location association and thus be observed by magazine readers. To identify where
an image featuring a woman or man appeared on the page (i.e., what we will refer to as image location)
we measured the distance from the top of the page to the vertical center of the image and expressed this
distance as a proportion of page length. To identify where a target appeared within the image (i.e., what
we will refer to as target location) we measured the distance from the top of the image to the middle of
the target and expressed this distance as a proportion of image length. Notably, the fact that men are taller
than women—on average—may help to explain vertical target location but not vertical image location.
Vertical size and restriction of range. More generally, the fact that men are taller than women
(on average) is typically offset by the tendency for female bodies to be emphasized over male bodies in
magazines. Put differently, female bodies tend to be larger than male bodies when in magazines (Archer,
Iritani, Kimes, & Barrios, 1983; Dodd, Harcar, Foerch, & Anderson, 1989). However, the vertical size of

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 23
an image or depicted person can restrict and even eliminate variability in vertical location, limiting the
possibility that any variable (here, gender) influences vertical location. For example, an image that
consumes 95% of the vertical length of a page can be moved up or down considerably less than an image
that consumes 30% of a page. As images and bodies increasingly consume vertical space, they have less
space to move up or down and therefore less variability in vertical location. Consequently, as images and
bodies increase in size, restriction of range should decrease the likelihood that a gender difference is
observed in vertical location. To examine this possibility, we coded the proportion of vertical page space
consumed by the target person (vertical size; M=.58, SD=.31) and the image (image size; M=.69,
SD=.33). We examine these variables as moderators.
Covariates and Moderators
Ecological approaches emphasize the complexity of scenes and contexts, such that spatial
location may be a valid cue to gender but only in specific contexts. We coded a number of variables that
may impact or be associated with gender-location correlations. The following variables were all
considered as covariates and moderators.
Magazine audience. We categorized each magazine according to whether the audience was
primarily (>65%) women, primarily (>65%) men, or general.
Page location. The first pages of a magazine typically include an extended table of contents and
large advertisements. The last pages of a magazine can often include extensive advertising and/or game
sections that limit the size of images. Hence, different criteria may influence image placement on these
pages. We thus referred to the original page selection criteria and coded whether a page was in the first
20%, second 20%, and so on.
Page context. Women are more likely than men to be pictured in the context of magazine
advertisements whereas the reverse is true for magazine stories (Fink & Kensicki, 2002; Hatton &
Trautner, 2011; Reichert & Carpenter, 2004; Reichert, Larnbiase, Morgan, Carstarphen, & Zuzwirn,
1999; Soley & Kurzbard, 1986). If story images appear higher in space than advertising images, page
context would be a confound with gender, and could thus explain a correlation between gender and

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 24
location. An advanced research assistant thus coded whether an image occurred in an advertisement or
story.
Perceived race of target person. To the extent that different gender norms are associated with
different racial identities (Browne & Misra, 2003; Landrine, 1985; Pyke & Johnson, 2003), it is possible
that the apparent race of a target person would be confounded with gender and influence spatial location.
Two independent coders separately identified the perceived race of each individual appearing in an
image. The following codes were used: of African descent, of Asian descent, of American descent, of
Hispanic descent, of European descent, of Middle Eastern descent, or of unclear descent. Percent
agreement was calculated as an indicator of reliability (89%) and a third independent rater’s codes were
used to resolve disagreements. Any remaining disagreements in which all three coders provided different
responses (2%) were resolved through discussion.
Work role of target person. Traditional gender roles regard men as wage-earners and women as
homemakers (Eagly & Steffen, 1984; Stone & Lovejoy, 2004) and these gender roles may be exhibited in
magazine images. If so, then to the extent that people in work settings are depicted higher in space than
other people, work role might explain a gender-location correlation in which men are located higher in
space than women (i.e., male spatial elevation). Indeed, a number of images in our sample included
people in work roles. Consequently, each image was coded according to whether the target person was or
was not depicted in a work role. Two independent coders separately identified whether each of the 634
targets appeared in an occupational role with the following codes: Yes, No, Unclear. Percent agreement
was calculated as an indicator of reliability (91%) and independent codes from a third rater were used to
resolve disagreements. Remaining disagreements in which all three coders provided different responses
(1%) were resolved through discussion.
Target person affect. There is evidence that women tend to exhibit more positive affect than men
(Hall, 1984; Hall, Carter, & Horgan, 2000; Hecht & LaFrance, 1998). To the extent that people exhibiting
positive affect are depicted higher in space than other people (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Meier &
Robinson, 2004; Schnall & Clore, 2004b; Wapner, Werner, & Krus, 1957) and to the extent that most of

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 25
these joyous people are women, it is possible that affect would moderate male spatial elevation, causing
female spatial elevation in images of happy people. Two independent raters identified each of the 634
individuals as expressing one of the following codes: Happy, Sad, Angry, Fearful, Disgusted, Neutral,
Other. Due to low rates of several emotions, we simplified specific emotion ratings into valence
(Positive, Neutral, Negative) and then percent agreement was calculated as an indicator of reliability
(74%). Codes from a third rater were used to resolve disagreements and any remaining disagreements in
which all three coders provided different discrete emotions (6%) were resolved through discussion. Most
disagreements regarded the perception of neutrality (Knutson, 1996; Tomkins & McCarter, 1964).
Target person vertical posture. Of magazine images involving people, many are simple face
shots. Among images that depict other parts of the body as well, it is often possible to determine whether
the target person is standing, sitting, or lying down. We coded such vertical posture for several reasons. It
is possible that the relationship between gender and vertical posture will be similar to that between gender
and overall vertical location, in that both vertical location and posture are associated with power (Tiedens
& Fragale, 2003; Weisfeld & Beresford, 1982; Weisfeld, Bloch, & Ivers, 1983) and both regard the
vertical axis of space. However, we did not expect vertical posture to account for male spatial elevation
because many magazine images include only faces and because we expected the location of the image
(not just the target person within the image) to play a role in male spatial elevation. Nonetheless, it was
important to test vertical posture as a covariate (and moderator). Two independent coders separately
identified vertical posture of the 634 target persons as: Unclear (face/shoulders only), Standing, Sitting,
Kneeling, Lying Down, Other. Due to low counts of individuals who were kneeling or lying down, we
translated those into simplified codes (Standing, Not Standing, Unclear) and then percent agreement was
calculated as an indicator of reliability (91%). Codes from a third rater were used to resolve
disagreements and remaining disagreements in which all three coders provided different responses (1%)
were resolved through discussion.
Results

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 26
The initial sample included 634 images (317 women). However, some of these images were of
pre-adolescent children, including a number of infants whose gender could not be clearly identified.
Although results do not meaningfully change with exclusion of these images, we excluded them to
maintain a dataset that was not contaminated by gender ambiguity. Consequently, our conclusions are
limited to images of adolescents and adults. The final sample included 561 images (283 images of a
woman). No magazine contributed more than 60 images or less than 20 images to this final sample. We
report all measures, manipulations, and exclusions for this study.
Gender-Location Associations in American Magazines
We hypothesized that men appear higher on magazine pages than women. To account for
location variance in each magazine, mixed models were again estimated in R (R Core Team, 2017) with
the lme4 package (Bates, Maechler, Bolker, & Walker, 2015) using Satterthwaite approximate degrees of
freedom (i.e., lmerTest; Kuznetsova, Brockhoff, & Christensen, 2017). To examine whether gender
impacted where a target appeared on the page, overall vertical location was analyzed as a function of
target gender (women (1) vs. men (-1); contrast-coded). Data were analyzed using linear mixed models
with random intercept of magazine. Gender had a significant effect on overall vertical location (b=.02,
se=.01, t(554.10)=2.70, p=.007) such that women appeared significantly further from the top of the page
(M=48% from the top of the page, SD=16%) than did men (M=44% from the top of the page, SD=17%)
consistent with male spatial elevation (see Figure 2).
7
This same pattern emerged after excluding the 47
images for which the target person’s body consumed the entire vertical space of a page, b=.02, se=.01,
t(59.43)=2.42, p=.019. Within this smaller sample, male spatial elevation grew stronger as bodies
consumed less page space, b=-.02, se=.01, t(513.99)=-2.03, p=.043: the simple effect of gender on overall
vertical location was strong when the target occupied a small amount of vertical space, b=.03, se=.01,
t(513.02)=3.22, p=.001, but absent when the target occupied a large amount of vertical space, b=.004,
se=.01, t(512.00)=.34, p=.736. This interaction is consistent with the idea that range restriction presents a
7
Simulations using the simR package (Green & Macleod, 2016) indicated that observed power was 79%, 95% CI
[72.69, 84.43].

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 27
measurement obstacle to identifying male spatial elevation in magazines. More generally, male spatial
elevation was observed in popular American magazines and became stronger with increases in the space
available to move depicted men and women up or down.
Male Spatial Elevation: Image Location and Body Location
Male spatial elevation in magazines may owe to gender differences in where images of women
and men are located within a page, or where women and men are located within images, or both. Similar
to overall vertical location, a multilevel model revealed a significant effect of target gender on image
location (b=.02, se=.01, t(552.90)=2.44, p=.015) such that images of women appeared significantly lower
on the pages (M=46% from the top of the page, SD=14%) than images of men (M=43%, SD=16%). With
respect to target location, gender did not have a significant effect on where a body was located within the
image, b=.003, se=.004, t(552.80)=.92, p=.357. However, there was a significant effect of gender on
image size (b=.05, se=.01, t(553.89)=3.44, p<.001) such that, consistent with prior objectification studies
(Archer et al., 1983; Dodd et al., 1989; Hatton & Trautner, 2011; Konrath & Schwarz, 2007), images of
Figure 2. An illustration of average vertical placement of women and men in magazines analyzed in Study 2.

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 28
women were significantly larger (M=74% of page height, SD=31%) than images of men (M=65% of page
height, SD=34%).
In summary, gender is not predictive of where a person appears within an image suggesting that
male spatial elevation in magazines is driven more by image location within a page than body location
within an image.
Male Spatial Elevation: Is it Redundant with Other Cues?
To examine whether or not a variable accounts for male spatial elevation, we entered the variable
together with gender in a multilevel model predicting overall vertical location. If the variable accounts for
male spatial elevation, the main effect of gender should be substantially reduced as compared to a
multilevel equation without covariates [see above: b=.02, se=.01, t(554.10)=2.70, p=.007].
None of the examined variables explained male spatial elevation. Specifically, in separate
regression equations, gender remained a significant predictor of overall vertical location after accounting
for (1) page type (story vs. ad): b=.02, se=.01, t(556.10)=2.71, p=.007; (2) perceived race: b=.02, se=.01,
t(543.59)=2.59, p=.010; (3) work role: b=.02, se=.01, t(551.60)=2.90, p=.004; (4) target person affect:
b=.02, se=.01, t(508)=2.78, p=.006
8
; (5) vertical posture: b=.03, se=.01, t(361)=3.39, p<.001; (6) page
number: b=.02, se=.01, t(552)=2.70, p=.007; or (7) magazine type: b=.02, se=.01, t(553.12)=2.70, p=.007.
Finally, we included all of these variables as covariates in a single mixed model equation. In this
equation, overall vertical location remained a significant predictor of target gender, b=.03, se=.01,
t(312.10)=3.54, p<.001. In short, the gender-location correlation was not explained by any of the
examined covariates.
Male Spatial Elevation: Moderator Variables
To examine whether or not a variable moderated male spatial elevation, we included the
interaction between this variable and gender in a mixed model equation predicting overall vertical
8
We encountered singularity issues in the mixed effects models either controlling for or moderating by target affect
and vertical posture that prevent us from using the estimates produced by the models. Therefore, we report analyses
in these models as fixed effects models and exclude random effects.

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 29
location. If the variable moderates male spatial elevation, the interaction term should be statistically
significant. Male spatial elevation was not significantly moderated by (1) page type (story vs. ad): b=.01,
se=.01, t(554.50)=1.34, p=.181; (2) perceived race: b=.003, se=.01, t(547.99)=.37, p=.711; (3) work role:
b=.01, se=.01, t(538.20)=1.30, p=.196; (4) target person affect: b=-.01, se=.01, t(507)=-1.08, p=.281; or
(5) page number: b=-.01, se=.01, t(550.15)=-.93, p=.355; but was marginally moderated by (6) type of
magazine: General vs. Women’s: b=-.02, se=.01, t(552.13)=-1.88, p=.060; General vs. Men’s: b=.003,
se=.01, t(548.44)=.24, p=.812; and (7) vertical posture: b=.02, se=.01, t(360)=1.98, p=.050. Interested
readers should see Supplementary Materials for more detailed description of these analyses.
The general pattern of data suggests that male spatial elevation is relatively robust to different
types of scenes, such as stories and ads, targets of different races, targets with different emotions, early
and late magazine pages, and so on. There were trends that suggested, however, that male spatial
elevation may be stronger in contexts associated with high power and status. For example, male spatial
elevation was non-significantly stronger in the context of stories than in ads, work-roles than non-work
roles, and for people who are standing versus sitting, kneeling, or laying (interested readers see
Supplementary Materials).
Additional Data Analyses
The supplementary materials contain descriptions of data that are of potential interest to readers.
There we describe inferential tests of whether depictions of women and men differ on each of the
moderator variables, provide descriptive statistics for the overall vertical location of women and men in
each specific magazine, and detail the covariate/moderator analyses.
Discussion
Male spatial elevation was consistently observed across popular American magazines.
Additionally, male spatial elevation could not be explained by a wide variety of other cues, such as the
location of the image in the magazine issue, whether the image occurred in the context of a story or an ad,
whether the person in the image appeared to be of a minority versus majority race, whether or not the

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 30
person in the image was in an occupational setting, nor the emotion expression of the person in the image.
In short, male spatial elevation was consistently observed in popular American magazines.
The effect size associated with male spatial elevation may be small (Chen, Cohen, & Chen,
2010), but it is not trivial, given its practical significance. Adult Americans report reading or looking at
magazines regularly and frequently despite the prevalence of social media and internet-based information
(Magazine release standards, 2011; US Media Audience Demographics, 4th Annual Edition, 2017;
Nicholas, 2018; Rosenstiel & Mitchell, 2012; Zenith, 2016). In fact, beyond print magazine
subscriptions—which become more likely once people visit a magazine website (e.g., Kaiser & Kongsted,
2012)—people purchase magazines at kiosks, read magazines in waiting rooms, and browse magazines at
supermarkets and bookstores. Popular magazines average about 250 pages per issue, with images
appearing on about 90% of those pages, so on average, any given magazine issue can be expected to have
about 150 pages with a single image of a woman or man (see Footnote 2). The number of pages per
magazine combined with the frequency of print magazine reading among Americans (2.72 issues
monthly; Nicholas, 2018) suggest that in practical terms, Americans see a considerable amount of male
spatial elevation monthly, even if only through magazines and despite the statistically-small effect size.
The design of Study 2 enabled us to collect data regarding male spatial elevation and to examine
possible explanatory and moderating variables. Male spatial elevation accrued via the placement of
images rather than the placement of people within images. Specifically, we observed an effect of image
location but not of body location on target gender. Hence, male spatial elevation took place within the
magazine page rather than within a magazine image. Second, male spatial elevation is independent of
several other media-based gender biases, such as gender biases in depictions of emotion expression
(Birnbaum & Croll, 1984; Masse & Rosenblum, 1988), work role (Bartsch, Burnett, Diller, & Rankin-
Williams, 2000; Craig, 1992; Glascock, 2001; Signorielli & Bacue, 1999; Signorielli, Kahlenberg,
Signorielli, & Kahlenberg, 2001), or prevalence in ads versus stories (Fink & Kensicki, 2002; Hatton &
Trautner, 2011; Reichert & Carpenter, 2004; Reichert et al., 1999; Soley & Kurzbard, 1986). Finally,

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 31
male spatial elevation may be stronger in some contexts than others, specifically those that may be
associated with power and status.
We have argued that collective perception of covaration between gender and location leads to
collective beliefs about the abstract traits of women and men. Study 1 provided evidence that seeing
individuals high vs. low in space causes perceivers to regard them as powerful and dominant vs.
powerless and submissive. Study 2 provided evidence for the collective perception of a pattern in which
images of men are consistently located higher in space than images of women. It is thus plausible that
repeated exposure to the gender-location cultural pattern (i.e., male spatial elevation) causes perceivers to
believe that men are more powerful and dominant than women.
STUDIES 3A-3G
We test this hypothesis with an experimental model that has several key characteristics. First,
given the vast array of visual features (e.g., color, texture), objects and artifacts, behaviors and
expressions, and so on that characterize any scene and the context (magazine page), it cannot be assumed
that perceivers spontaneously encode gender and location into long-term memory. For this reason, it was
critical to expose people to gender-location associations amidst the noise in which those associations
typically appear (in this case, magazine pages). Although these magazine pages were not presented in
perceivers’ homes, at grocery store lines, or other contexts, our paradigm can be compared to one in
which perceptual and social noise is artificially removed from each scene, such that only a face and/or
body is visible (for example) and located high versus low on a computer screen. In these contexts, the
association between gender and location may be especially likely to be encoded: by simplifying the
learning task from one that represents real scenes and context to one that isolates the person from scene
and context, the less externally-valid method may be more likely to exert statistically-large effects on
perceivers’ beliefs. However, this method fails to approximate the challenges that perceivers face in
learning from typical environments. By presenting women and men in-scene (image) and in-context
(magazine page), we aim to model the complex statistical environments faced by perceivers. In so doing,

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 32
we aimed to minimize methodological features that limit the generalizability of observed effects to typical
environments.
A second feature of our experimental model is that it proscribes experimental methods and is
therefore limited in its ability to approximate long-term exposure to magazine images. For practical
reasons, exposure in the current experiment was decidedly short-term and limited to about 80 images.
Given the thousands of images of people that Americans see in media over a week or month and given
that we present those very images in their original context, even statistically-small causal effects are likely
to be indicative of meaningful, long-term influences on Americans’ beliefs about women and men.
With these methodological features in mind, we set to test our hypotheses regarding
reinforcement of gender stereotypes. Specifically, we examined whether repeated exposure to the gender-
location cultural pattern could cause perceivers to believe that men are more powerful than women.
Internal Meta-Analysis
Experiment 3 is comprised of seven studies with the same experimental manipulation and a
nearly-identical outcome measure. These studies were conducted over several years, due to practical
limitations to subject pool size combined with avoidance of web-based samples (to ensure participants’
sustained attention during magazine exposure). These limitations made it impractical to run individual
studies that were fully powered for a small effect size. We elected instead to run individual studies that
included slight variations to procedures and measures, in anticipation that a procedural change might
yield a larger effect size. Ultimately, these seven studies revealed a reliable but statistically-small effect
with the same outcome measure.
Following recent advice (e.g., Cumming, 2014; Goh, Hall, & Rosenthal, 2016), we thus report an
internal meta-analysis of those studies. This advice is based on the observation that measurement error,
common to all psychology studies, will lead to considerable variation in effect size across studies (e.g.,
Stanley & Spence, 2014), and other variables—including the use of separate samples—lead to further
variation (Cumming, 2014). Internal meta-analyses are based on effect sizes from multiple samples and
should therefore provide more reliable information about the true effect size. This approach may be

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 33
especially useful for small (but practically-meaningful) effect sizes, for which attaining sufficient a priori
power requires prohibitively large sample sizes. The internal meta-analysis presented below provides an
approximate effect size for how exposure to the gender-location associations influences perceivers’
beliefs about women and men.
Overview
Participants were randomly assigned to view multiple magazine pages, each with an image of a
man placed high in space or an image of a woman placed low in space (male spatial elevation condition)
or alternatively, to view magazine pages with an image of a woman placed high in space or an image of a
man placed low in space (female spatial elevation condition). We refer to this manipulation as gendered
spatial elevation. Following this manipulation, participants rated women and men (separately) for traits of
powerfulness and dominance. In addition to this measure included in all studies, individual studies
included idiosyncratic measures. All measures, manipulations, and exclusions in the studies are disclosed
here or in the Supplementary Materials.
Participants and Setting
Participants recruited from undergraduate psychology classes received extra credit. Community
participants recruited from a classifieds-website received pay. The experiment was conducted on
computers using MediaLab© software (Jarvis, 2012), with each computer located in its own room. Sample
sizes ranged from 59 to 238 (67% women; 75% white; see Table 1).
Manipulation and Procedure
Each experimental condition included a set of magazine pages (from Study 2) where targets of
one gender were consistently displayed higher than targets of the other gender. In the male spatial
elevation (MSE) condition, images of men were located high on the magazine pages and images of
women low on magazines pages (manipulated as in Study 1; see Figure 1). In the female spatial elevation
condition (FSE), images of women were located high on magazine pages and images of men were located
low on magazine pages. Each magazine page included only one image, and half of the images in each
condition were of women and half were of men. The vast majority of the images were consistent with

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 34
Table 1. Sample size details for Studies 3a-3g
Note. Participants were excluded if they a) did not complete the study, b) had completed the study previously, c) experienced extreme technical difficulties (e.g.,
completed dependent variables before, rather than after, independent variable), or d) were younger than 18. Numbers listed in parentheses refer to the sample size
including the participants assigned to an exploratory control condition. All samples included university students with the exception of Study 3a which was
comprised of both university students (27%) and local community members recruited via Craigslist (73%).
Gender
Age
Race
Exclusions
Study
N
Women
Men
M
S
D
Range
Asian
Black
Hispanic
Latinx
Middle
Eastern
Native
American
White
Multi-
racial
No
Response
n
3a
112
55
57
31
14
18-72
12
7
5
1
0
76
10
1
4
3b
174
123
51
20
3
18-46
20
6
19
1
2
118
4
4
3
3c
104
(153)
70
34
19
1
18-22
8
1
3
0
0
89
3
0
14
3d
238
165
73
20
1
18-29
29
3
17
1
1
173
10
4
23
3e
102
(153)
64
38
20
2
18-30
15
1
6
0
0
77
3
0
10
3f
59
(89)
42
17
19
1
18-23
8
0
2
1
1
40
3
4
4
3g
84
(127)
65
19
19
1
18-22
4
3
5
0
1
65
4
2
8
TOTAL
873
(1046)
584
289
21
3
18-72
96
21
57
4
5
638
37
15
66

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 35
condition (e.g., images of men located high on MSE condition pages) but to introduce variability (as
occurs in real magazines), a minority of the images were inconsistent with location (e.g., images of men
located low on MSE condition pages). A critical aspect of the experimental manipulation was the degree
of control—the same pages were shown in both conditions, and the only difference was whether the
image appeared high or low on the page.
Table 2. Experimental Manipulation Details
Note: a In a study ostensibly on “impressions of people in magazines”, participants rated targets in
magazine pages for personality dominance; b In a study ostensibly on “judgments of people in
magazines”, participants identified gender (woman/man) of targets in magazine pages; c The control
condition was intended to be a combination of MSE and FSE conditions but due to experimenter error,
this balance was not achieved and several confounds (e.g., story vs. ad) remained.
In each study, participants were randomly assigned to the female spatial elevation or male spatial
elevation condition. Participants saw many magazine pages (for up to 5 seconds) and rated each on
“aesthetic appeal” (most studies) or another dimension (see Table 2). After rating all of the magazine
pages in their condition, participants were asked (via computer) to participate in a separate questionnaire
study. All participants continued and completed the primary measure of gender stereotypes (described
below). Finally, they completed demographics questions before being thanked and debriefed (and paid if
Study
Total
Magazine
Pages
% of Pages
Consistent
w/Condition
Cover Story Ratings
Page
Exposure
Time
Control
Conditionc
3a
84
85
Aesthetic Appeal
2s
No
3b
84
85
Aesthetic Appeal
2s
No
3c
84
85
Aesthetic Appeal OR
Target Dominancea
2s
Yes
3d
80
100
Target Genderb
Until
Response
(Median
RT=709ms)
No
3e
78
87
Aesthetic Appeal
5s
Yes
3f
84
85
Aesthetic Appeal
5s
Yes
3g
80
80
Target Genderb
Until
Response
(Median
RT=723ms)
Yes

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 36
community participants). There were minor departures from the standard procedure and manipulation in
each study, and these are presented above in Table 2.
Primary Outcome
In each of the seven studies, our primary outcome was a difference score measure regarding
gender stereotypes of power and dominance. These difference scores were computed by standardizing
ratings of women and subtracting them from standardized ratings of men (i.e., higher scores = more
stereotyping). Our difference score measure was modeled after the Bem Sex Role Inventory (Bem, 1974;
BSRI). The BSRI includes 40 traits relevant to gender stereotypicality (20 feminine, 20 masculine) and 20
gender-neutral traits. Participants typically rate themselves on these traits but the BSRI has also been used
to measure gender stereotypes, in which participants rate “women” and “men” (separately) on each of the
60 traits (e.g., Powell & Butterfield, 1979; Spence & Buckner, 2000; Weisbuch, Beal, & O’Neal, 1999).
For each trait, a difference score is calculated between beliefs about women versus men. We followed this
logic and thus computed difference scores for trait adjectives associated with power and dominance.
In two studies (Studies 3a and 3b), we drew those adjectives directly from the BSRI. In these
studies, we selected the trait adjectives “submissive” and “yielding” (feminine), as well as “dominant”
and “has leadership abilities” (masculine). Using a 7-point scale from 1, Never or almost never true, to 7,
Almost always true, participants indicated the extent to which women or men behave in those ways (e.g.,
“Men, in general, are submissive.”). Some BSRI traits, however, may not be regarded as indicative of
power and dominance. For example, participants may interpret “leadership abilities” with respect to
several traits including stereotypically feminine traits (e.g., nurturance, empathy). These traits need not be
equivalent to personality dominance, and although “yielding” is an antonym of “dominant,” it may not be
understood as such by all participants due to its relative rarity. Thus, in all but one study (Study 3b), we
focused more explicitly on the terms “dominant” and “powerful”. Participants simply indicated the extent
to which they believed women or men exhibit power and dominance (e.g., “women, in general, have
dominant personalities”) on a 7-point scale (from 1, Never or almost never true, to 7, Almost always true).

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 37
In some studies, the wording of the power/dominance questions was slightly altered. In Studies 3a
and 3f, we added “in the United States” at the conclusion of the items (e.g., “Women, in general, have
dominant personalities in the United States”). In Studies 3d, 3e, and 3g, we aimed to limit any socially-
desirable responding by requesting ratings of what “most people” think (e.g., “Most people think that
women, in general, have dominant personalities”; see Krueger, 1996) and ratings of women and men were
embedded among ratings of other groups (e.g., teachers, white people; see Eagly, Mladinic, & Otto,
1991). Finally, in Studies 3d and 3g we additionally asked participants to provide summary ratings (on
power and dominance) regarding the men and women they had actually seen in the magazine pages.
These slight alterations in question wording did not produce significant heterogeneity across studies. A
test of homogeneity (i.e., Qwithin) suggest that the effect sizes observed in the seven samples fall within
those expected from a normal sampling variation, χ2(6)=2.62, p=.854.
In all studies, scores on the “woman” items were standardized and subtracted from standardized
scores on the corresponding “man” items, and then aggregated. Positive difference scores indicated
endorsement of gender stereotypes: the belief that men exhibit more power and dominance than do
women.
The Self and Exploratory Measures
Additional exploratory measures varied from study to study. In the initial study (Study 3a), an
exploratory purpose was to examine if exposure to the gender-location association would extend to self-
evaluations and a non-significant effect was consistent with this idea, leading to several other studies that
included self-oriented measures. Additionally, in a few of the samples, we piloted new measures for use
in future work and although those measures were not primary to the current work, we report the effects of
the experimental manipulation on them. Details and analyses are presented in the Supplemental Materials.
However, this article is focused on gender stereotypes and the primary dependent measure described
above.

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 38
Results
We examined the extent to which
gendered spatial elevation influenced
participants’ beliefs about women’s and men’s
dominance and power in each of the studies.
To do this, we meta-analyzed the seven
experiments (N=873) using random effects
(Goh et al., 2016). Following procedures
described by Goh and colleagues (2016) for
combining and comparing effect sizes, we
observed a small but reliable effect of gendered
spatial elevation as indicated by a one-sample
t-test of the mean effect size against zero, M
d=.20, t(6)=3.59, p=.012, two-tailed: exposure
to male (vs. female) spatial elevation caused
participants to endorse stronger gender
stereotypes of power and dominance.
9
As
illustrated in Figure 3 and detailed in Table 3,
effect sizes (-.04 < d < .42) across studies
yielded a relatively narrow 95% confidence interval [.08, .32] centered on d=.20. A fixed effects test of
the overall effect was also significant, d=.14, Z=2.10, p=.035, two-tailed. We report meta-analyses by
rating type (i.e., ratings of power or dominance; ratings of women or men) and gender of participant (i.e.,
woman or man) in the supplementary analyses.
9
A sensitivity analysis revealed that meta-analytic methods permitted .84 power.
Figure 3. Average Effect size (i.e., Cohen’s d) by study.

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 39
Discussion
A reliable but small effect emerged across seven samples. Seeing male spatial elevation in real
scenes caused participants to endorse gender stereotypes of power and dominance. As we have argued,
the small size of this effect should be considered against the context in which it emerged. Any one
magazine page includes a complex array of visual features, objects, behaviors, and expressions, and
different pages have quite different arrays of features. Amidst the many potential sources of information
in these pages, participants adapted their beliefs to the correlation between gender and location.
Additionally, our experiments were necessarily limited in their ability to approximate long term exposure
to magazine images and each participant saw no more than 84 pages. Yet the average American is likely
exposed to several print magazine issues in a given month, ensuring that they see hundreds or thousands
of images. Given that male spatial elevation occurs across print magazines (Study 1), the statistically-
small effect likely reflects a meaningful influence on Americans’ beliefs about women and men.
Participants in each of the seven samples encountered the same experimental manipulation but
the manipulation varied slightly in its details (e.g., number of pages, cover story). Inspection of those
details did not reveal any obvious moderators (variations noted in Table 2). For example, samples that
saw “distractor” pages which were counter to the conditional assignment did not exhibit smaller effects
Table 3. Results for Studies 3a-3g
FSE
MSE
d
Minimum
Detectable
d
M
SD
M
SD
3a
-.10
(.89)
.11
(.88)
.24
.53
3b
-.08
(1.35)
.07
(1.35)
.11
.43
3c
-.15
(.95)
.15
(1.17)
.26
.55
3d
.03
(1.44)
-.03
(1.21)
-.04
.36
3e
-.04
(.68)
.05
(.65)
.13
.56
3f
-.22
(1.06)
.19
(.90)
.42
.74
3g
-.18
(1.40)
.16
(1.24)
.24
.62

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 40
than samples that only saw condition-consistent pages. We therefore did not conduct more formal tests of
these moderators but broader studies of those features (e.g., participants see only 2 pages versus 840
pages) might provide important information about the nature of these effects.
There was an important limitation to Experiment 3. The use of an active task during exposure
(participants always rated something) prevents us from concluding that effects we observed were goal-
independent. We only have evidence these effects emerge when participants are evaluating something
about each page, though in our view perceivers are typically evaluating something when they see images
or read pages. The limited exposure time for each page was included to limit overall exposure (always
less than 10 minutes in total for all pages), to model the experience of magazine readers who flip through
pages (e.g., in supermarket lines), and to avoid overexposing participants to paid advertisements (half of
the images were ads). Nonetheless, it is a limitation that brief by-page exposure times did not model the
experiences of people who read articles and spend considerable time reading each page.
Study 3 also had unique design components which should aide interpretation of the results. First,
the use of real mass media content in experimental manipulations typically includes an inherent lack of
experimental control. To address this potential lack of control, we used the same media content in both
experimental conditions. Moreover, we matched each image of a woman with an image of a man and
confirmed that there were no differences in theoretically relevant variables (e.g., race, affect, posture) on
the basis of target image gender (see Supplementary Materials). In short, the two experimental conditions
were well-controlled with respect to eliminating potential confounding factors. By referring to data from
Study 1, we can also confirm that the people shown in Study 3 were regarded as more powerful when
their magazine-based image was placed high (versus low) in space. These findings thus suggest that the
spatial pattern that characterizes gender in real magazine pages can cause magazine readers to strengthen
their gender stereotypes through social-spatial associations.
General Discussion
In centuries past – and even in the modern era - it has been common for people to believe that
men were more dominant and powerful than women. Although modern American magazines do not

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 41
typically verbalize this sentiment they do depict men in positions that are literally superior to those of
women (Study 1). Thus, when encountered in magazines, readers see men in more powerful locations
than women (Study 2). Repeated exposure to such socially-prevalent covariation causes perceivers to
believe that men, in general, have more powerful and dominant personalities than women (Study 3).
Vertical Space and Social Judgment: Generalizable Effects
In our view, causal effects are most accurately described and evaluated at the level of operational
definitions, rather than at the level of conceptual definition. The latter form of interpretation obscures
important contextual features of the methodology that might increase, decrease, or moderate a given
effect size. In this case, a magazine picture’s vertical location led to changes in perceivers’ self-reported
judgments of the pictured person’s power. Although similar results have been regarded as empirical
support for the theory that people draw from spatial concepts to understand and use power concepts
(Landau et al., 2010), we sought to test the more modest hypothesis that a higher (vs. lower) spatial
location causes people to be judged as powerful—even when those people are located in rich and complex
contexts. This hypothesis is more modest in the sense that it corresponds to an effect, rather than a theory
that explains the effect. Though more modest, empirical support for this latter hypothesis has been subject
to questions of generalizability from one participant sample to another (Klein et al., 2018; Lakens et al.,
2011; L. Schubert et al., 2013). Yet because the larger body of evidence supports the hypothesis across
different paradigms, laboratories, and decades (Dai & Zhu, 2018; Giessner et al., 2011; Giessner &
Schubert, 2007; Holmgren et al., 2018; Jiang, Sun, & Zhu, 2015; Lakens et al., 2011; Lu et al., 2017;
Meier & Dionne, 2009; Moeller, Robinson, & Zabelina, 2008; Quadflieg et al., 2011; Robinson, Zabelina,
Ode, & Moeller, 2008; Schoel, Eck, & Greifeneder, 2014; T. W. Schubert, 2005; Von Hecker et al., 2013;
Wu et al., 2016; Zanolie et al., 2012), we sought to test the hypothesis that participants’ judgments of
power would be influenced by the locations of people in real magazine pages, finding support for this
hypothesis and thus for the generalizability of the effect.
We interpret these results as support for the view that the effects of vertical location on power
judgments are likely to extend to real-world visual contexts. Of course, it is notable that this study

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 42
occurred in a psychological laboratory and the magazine pages in Study 1 were presented outside of the
context in which they are typically read. We acknowledge that the laboratory setting limits the overall
generalizability of the study. However, important elements of the study were high in generalizability.
First, the Study 1 materials were images that had each been seen by thousands of people (at least) outside
of the laboratory. Thus, people commonly seen in magazine images were rated as more powerful and
dominant when their image was higher versus lower on the page. Second, the critical stimuli in most prior
studies were isolated from the rich and complex visual and social cues typically available to social
perceivers. In the current study, the people in the images varied in the clothes they wore, the scenes they
appeared, and the bodily postures they exhibited, and the images themselves varied in size, color, lighting,
and so on. The images located in real magazine pages, often surrounded by text in varied fonts, discussing
varied topics, or else not surrounded by text at all (usually ads). Perceivers of such magazine pages have a
tremendous amount of social information available to them, just as they do whenever they perceive other
people outside of the laboratory. In these respects, the conditions of the study conform strongly to
Brunswik’s (1955) guidelines for representative design, whereby visual stimuli should not be robbed of
their natural context when presented to participants in studies of visual perception, social judgment, and
other areas. We thus claim that the current results provide the strongest evidence to date that the influence
of vertical position on social judgments extends to typical environments.
It is also our view that scholarly discussions about the generalizability of psychological science
have underweighted the importance of each study’s external validity. For example, people do not
typically see isolated words on computer screens so although studies which use those stimuli may provide
valuable internally-valid evidence for theories of social-spatial associations, these studies cannot provide
evidence that social-spatial associations play a role in perceivers’ judgments of people in typical social
environments. In fact, some have argued that the importance of theory-testing ultimately rests with how
well principles derived from those theory-tests describe how people typically perceive, think, and behave
(Mook, 1983). In this respect, the generalizability of the study environment may be an important criterion
against which to weight the importance of replications. In fact, generalizability can be achieved largely

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 43
without reductions in internal validity (e.g., see Cultural Snapshots; Weisbuch et al., 2017) and we believe
the current study is a step in that direction.
Beyond Linguistic Metaphors: Visual Metaphor in American Magazines
Conceptual Metaphor Theory suggests that linguistic metaphors should be ubiquitous and indeed,
research in corpus linguistics suggests that relationships between words are frequently non-literal
(Deignan, 2008). However, corpus linguists have been critical of other cognitive-linguistic approaches to
examining conceptual metaphor theory. For example, Deignan (2008) writes,
From the perspective of the applied corpus linguist, there is a central problem with the
language data that many researchers use either to support or refute CMT: they are often
invented. The data are generally of two types: they are produced from the researcher’s or
participants’ intuitions, or they are gathered from psycholinguistic experiments, such as
testing and comparing participants’ reactions to various metaphorical and non-
metaphorical language items in invented texts. This applies to many researchers who
work tightly within the CMT paradigm, and also more widely to cognitive linguistic
research into metaphor. Applied and corpus linguists have known for some years that
intuition is not a good guide to language use (for example, Sinclair, 1991, 2004), and it
has been shown that sentences invented for the study of metaphor often contain atypical
word meanings and lexico-grammatical structures (for example, Deignan, 2005). A
further problem is that the invented data tend to consist of single sentences or at best
short paragraphs, lacking in context, and therefore sometimes suggesting ambiguity that
is rarely present in natural discourse. (p. 151).
Corpus linguists address these issues through quantitative analyses of text databases which can be
used to identify linguistic metaphors that are actually common in texts, rather than those assumed to be
common by scientists’ intuition. Further, corpus analyses can reveal the natural contexts of linguistic
metaphors—after all, linguistic metaphors that appear in texts must be part of a broader narrative within a
paragraph or section. This quantitative approach can thus be used to examine if, as suggested by
Conceptual Metaphor Theory, a given concrete concept (vertical location) is typically used in linguistic
metaphor to convey a specific abstract concept (power). Yet this approach is limited in that it applies only
to language and may only reflect how people think about language rather than how people think more
generally (e.g., McGlone, 2007).
We therefore used an approach analogous to corpus linguistics to examine the metaphorical
contents of visual environments created by humans. We theorized that cognitive mappings between

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 44
abstract and concrete concepts would be reflected in the layout of images in American magazines, just as
those cognitive mappings may be reflected in the layout of words in English texts. Specifically, we
expected culturally-common visual layouts to locate more powerful people (men) higher in space than
less powerful people (women). We analyzed a large representative sample of American magazine pages,
measured where a picture of a woman or man was located on the page, and examined several contextual
variables that might constrain visual metaphor usage. We found that women’s images were placed lower
on magazine pages than were men’s images, consistent with the theory that the visual layout of magazines
reflects metaphorical thinking in the construction of those layouts.
There was little evidence that the gender-location relationship was constrained to specific
contexts (e.g., ad vs. story), and as a result, alternative explanations cannot be ruled out. Another
possibility is that metaphor played no role whatsoever, and magazine editors simply layout magazines
according to their knowledge of height differences between women and men. These competing
explanations are currently being examined in experiments examining how people construct environments
to contain visual metaphors along the vertical plane (Caccioppoli, Suitner, Lamer, & Maass, 2017).
Evidence from these experiments suggests that when threatened, highly identified men put images of
masculine objects (e.g., soccer player, lizard) higher than images of feminine objects (e.g., ballerina,
kitten; Caccioppoli et al., 2017). Thus, male spatial elevation may occur in typical environments because
men put masculine things higher in space when their gender identity it threatened. Indeed, although the
sample size of magazines was N=12, the Study 2 data indicates that male spatial elevation was larger in
magazines that had male editors (n=9 magazine e.g., Entertainment Weekly, Money; b=.03, se=.01,
t(58.63)=3.03, p=.004) than female editors (n=3 magazines e.g., People, Parenting; b=.002, se=.01,
t(19.78)=.18, p=.861).
Another possible explanation for the prevalence of male spatial elevation in magazines is that
people or editors simply recreate the patterns that are familiar to them. Indeed, there is evidence that
perceptual representations of men and women include spatial locations, such that people literally see more
masculinity in faces that are higher in space. People may simply elect to recreate these perceptual

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 45
representations in their physical space. One measure from Study 3a provides preliminary support for this
idea: participants who had recently seen women low on the pages (i.e., in the male spatial elevation
condition) placed the names of female CEOs lower in an organizational chart than did those who had
recently seen men low on the pages (i.e., in the female spatial elevation condition; see Supplementary
Materials for analysis). Thus, it is possible that men are located higher than women in magazines simply
because people create physical environments that reflect what they have seen (i.e., they recreate their
perceptual representations). It seems likely that multiple mechanisms—perhaps gender-role threat and
preferences for familiarity—account for the effects noted in Study 2, though more research is needed to
test this idea formally. More generally, this is some of the first (not the first) evidence that the visual
layout of constructed environments are consistent with the principles of Conceptual Metaphor Theory.
We look forward to continued research on if and how people use visual metaphors to construct social
environments.
Cultural Reinforcement of Gender Stereotypes through Social-Spatial Associations
Conceptual Metaphor Theory suggests that people draw from concrete source concepts, like
physical location, to understand more abstract target concepts, such as power (Landau et al., 2010).
Consistent with this theory, we used the Cultural Snapshots paradigm (Pauker et al., 2019; Weisbuch et
al., 2017) to examine whether more powerful people (men) are located higher in space than less powerful
people (women) in constructed social environments, and if study participants would respond to this
environment by thinking of men as more powerful than women. The findings were consistent with the
principles of Conceptual Metaphor Theory: men were depicted higher in space than women in popular
magazine pages (Study 2), and Study 3 participants who observed this pattern were more likely (than
those who observed the opposite pattern) to believe that men are more powerful than women. These
findings suggest that participants’ beliefs about gender differences in power were influenced by their
recent perceptions of gender differences in vertical locations.
The results of Study 3 are broadly consistent with the theory that people routinely draw from
conceptions of vertical space to think about power. Most participants (Studies 3a, 3b, 3d, 3e, 3f, and 3g)

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 46
were not instructed to encode the magazine pages in terms of dominance or power, and yet seeing men in
higher page locations than women caused them to strengthen their belief that men are more powerful than
women. Participants did not judge power until after all the magazine pages had been evaluated, and these
judgments were about women and men in general (rather than any one exemplar). Accordingly, it seems
safe to suggest that participants either encoded women’s and men’s vertical location (on magazine pages)
in terms of power or retrieved information about women’s and men’s vertical locations in order to judge
women’s and men’s power. Either way, women’s and men’s vertical locations in magazines influenced
participants’ judgments of women’s and men’s power because these participants spontaneously recruited
representations of vertical space to think about power. These findings, coupled with the generalizability of
the paradigm, are thus consistent with the theory that participants routinely recruit from representations of
vertical space to judge the power of people in general and social groups in particular.
The Vertical Plane of Space and Judgments of Power: Relative and Absolute Space?
The findings of Study 1 are consistent with the hypothesis that people can make inferences about
power based on absolute (rather than just relative) vertical location—that is, when only a single target is
visible at a time. This is a notable departure from prior research. Past studies on the topic have usually
employed designs in which a powerful and powerless target appear simultaneously (e.g., “king” above
“servant”) on the computer screen (Giessner & Schubert, 2007; T. W. Schubert, 2005). In Study 1 and
Study 3, participants saw multiple magazine pages that each featured a single target and their judgments
of individual power (Study 1) and group-based power (Studies 3a-3g) were consistent with the absolute
vertical location of images on magazine pages. It is nonetheless possible that participants made implicit
comparisons across trials, as each participant rated some pages with images located high and some pages
with images located low. Indeed, Lakens and colleagues (2011) found that it was necessary to have both
kinds of trials (powerful and powerless) for vertical location to have an effect. Vertical location only
influenced judgments of power if, for example, participants judged targets who were located high in space
on some trials and targets who were located low in space on other trials. The concrete source concept of
vertical location was used to infer power, but only when location varied across targets. Given the

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 47
variation in where people, images, and objects appear along the vertical plane in typical settings, this
research suggests that it is likely that vertical location is used as a cue to infer power in these settings.
Culture and Gender Stereotypes
Much has been written about the relationship between culture and gender but we were
specifically interested in how gender stereotypes are communicated and transmitted. The literature on the
transmission of stereotypes often focuses on linguistic communication (e.g., (Lyons & Kashima, 2001,
2003; Maass, Milesi, Zabbini, & Stahlberg, 1995; Wigboldus, Semin, & Spears, 2000). We contribute to
this literature by examining nonverbal cues. Further, we examined images likely to be encountered by
thousands or millions of people whereas prior work on social transmission has focused on interpersonal
communication in which only two or three people directly perceive the available social cues (Kashima,
2000; Lyons & Kashima, 2003). For example, people are more likely to communicate stereotypic than
counterstereotypic information when reproducing a story that they have heard—by the time the story has
been reproduced by 3 separate people in a chain, it becomes quite stereotypic (e.g., Lyons & Kashima,
2001, 2003). Interpersonal communication clearly helps people to maintain stereotypical knowledge, by
interpersonal communication is not the only means through which people communicate with each other.
We aimed to examine cultural communication more broadly, by examining the influence of images
encountered frequently by many people. This methodological feature is important in that existing research
on the socialization of gender stereotypes has focused on either content-analyses of media or closely-
controlled experimental studies, but not both. Hence prior studies are limited in their ability to draw
conclusions about the causal influence of widespread cultural practices on the gender stereotypes of a
broadly-distributed population. This is an important limitation, as many feminist theories link those
widespread practices to broadly-distributed stereotypes. In the current work we began to address this
limitation. The evidence presented in Studies 1-3 is consistent with the theory that gender stereotypes are
subtly communicated to a widely-distributed population through vertical locations and that this subtly-
communicated bias shapes perceivers’ endorsement of gender stereotypes—even when the bias is
presented in the complexity of its environmental niche (magazine pages).

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 48
An Ecological Approach to Gender Stereotypes: The Importance of Space
When people see women and men, they always see textures, contrast, edges, spatial locations, and
other visuospatial features. We broadly reasoned that if any of these cues are utilized by perceivers to
infer traits and are actually associated with target gender, perceivers may learn that the relevant traits are
associated with gender. We focused our efforts here on vertical location and found that vertical location is
an ecologically-valid cue to gender (Study 2) that is utilized by perceivers to infer power (Study 1), such
that perceivers ultimately learn that men are more powerful than women (Study 3). In this way, we extend
prior work on spatial biases (Hegarty, Lemieux, & McQueen, 2010; Maass, Suitner, Favaretto, &
Cignacchi, 2009; Maass, Suitner, & Nadhmi, 2014) by reporting evidence that the presence of spatial
biases in constructed environment may not only reflect stereotypes but also help to transmit them.
The current work also illustrates a theoretically-relevant advance in methodology. At the broadest
level, and in agreement with other ecological theories in psychology, Brunswik’s insistence that minds
adapt to their environment (Brunswik, 1949) is analogous to feminist principles regarding the influence of
mass media and other cultural settings on human beliefs about women and men. Yet Brunswik’s ideas
have rarely been applied to the emergence of stereotypes. This is unfortunate, given that Brunswik’s
ecological approach (1956) has received considerable interest in several domains of psychological
science. For example, judgment and decision-making scholars refer to Brunswik’s principles in arguing
that an individual’s ecology can explain their use of judgment heuristics (Bullock & Todd, 1999;
Gigerenzer, 2004). Brunswik is also frequently cited in research on interpersonal communication, where
his lens model (Brunswik, 1943, 1952, 1955) is used to explain how proximal cues (e.g., body motion)
may be associated with some distal trait (e.g., sexual orientation) and with a perceiver’s inference (e.g., of
sexual orientation; e.g., Johnson, Gill, Reichman, & Tassinary, 2007). Yet as we’ve illustrated herein,
Brunswik’s theorizing can also be used to inform methodologies for examining cultural influences on
gender stereotypes and gender roles. Hence, Social Role Theory (Eagly & Steffen, 1984) and other
similar theories might be explored through the use of methodologies similar to those employed here.

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 49
The second key contribution of Brunswik’s theorizing is an understanding of how visual cues,
such as spatial location, are situated within a complex and probabilistic landscape of visual and social
cues, sometimes referred to as a multi-cue environment (Hammond, 1955; Hursch et al., 1964). Within
this environment it is no easy task for minds to adapt to any valid cue to gender (e.g., hair, vertical
location), given the attentional and capacity limitations of perception and cognition. For this reason, and
to model how people typically perceive social scenes, it was important to examine cues in the context in
which they systematically vary with gender. We have thus presented a method for accomplishing broad
goals of the endeavor to examine how culture shapes gender.
Limitations
The environmental association between vertical space and gender may take different forms in
different contexts and thus generate rather complex beliefs for frequent visitors to those contexts.
Although we observed only two marginally significant moderators in Study 2 (i.e., posture and magazine
audience, see Supplementary Materials), some contexts seem less likely than others to include male
spatial elevation. For example, male spatial elevation was (non-significantly) stronger in contexts
emphasizing power (e.g., occupational contexts). Alternatively, domains in which women are
stereotypically superior to men may even reverse the typical gender-location correlation. For example,
women’s bodies are generally regarded as more aesthetically appealing than men’s bodies (Israel &
Strassberg, 2009; Rhodes, Hickford, & Jeffery, 2000) and contexts which emphasize the visual appeal of
a body might eliminate or reverse the typical gender-location correlation (e.g., ads for lingerie or other
contexts in which bodies are objectified; Baker, 2005; Kang, 1997; Lindner, 2004). There were relatively
few images with sexually-revealing clothing in Study 2, making a reliable comparison difficult but
differences in male spatial elevation across contexts may generate relatively complex belief patterns in
observers. The current work should foreshadow research on how three-way interactions between
perceptual cues, social categories, and context inform relatively complex belief patterns about women,
men, and other social categories.

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 50
Another potential limitation in the current study is the small but reliable effect sizes in Study 3.
At a superficial level, a reader may interpret these small effects as evidence that the cultural influence of
the gender-location association on stereotype transmission is minimal, if reliable. As noted earlier,
however, the frequency with which people read magazines suggests that people likely see a large number
of images containing women or men on a regular basis, ensuring that a relatively small difference in their
vertical placement accumulates over a lifetime, year, month, or week. Study 3 experimentally modeled
how accumulated exposure to this pattern might influence viewers’ stereotypes. Although this effect was
small, a change to viewers’ explicit stereotypes after seeing 80 images suggests that exposure
accumulated over a longer period of time may have a more substantial influence. Thus, although these
studies yielded small effect sizes we believe that these effects have more practical significance than
similar studies using less ecologically-valid materials.
Finally, it is possible that participants' tacit beliefs about verticality center on valence. High
vertical locations are related to positive mood and affect (Crawford, Margolies, Drake, & Murphy, 2006;
Meier & Robinson, 2004, 2006). Therefore, to the extent being powerful is considered more positive than
being powerless, participants may rate people in high vertical positions to be powerful. Indeed, there was
a tendency to rate pages with targets high as more aesthetically pleasing than pages with targets low (e.g.,
Study 3a: t(109)=2.34, p=.021). However, this bias was unrelated to gender stereotyping in either the
female spatial elevation (r(55)=.01, p=.955) or male spatial elevation (r(51)=-.18, p=.211) condition
suggesting that associations between valence and verticality cannot account for the stereotyping effects
observed here. It is therefore possible that social-spatial associations of positivity and power operate
independently. It is also possible that people do not perceive power as a positive attribute given that
perceptions of dominance tend to elicit negative affect (Driskell & Salas, 2005). Thus, this evidence is
most consistent with the theory that what people learn about targets’ dominance based on their vertical
location is guided by social-spatial associations with power. However, there may be complex interactions
of vertical location with other learned associations that render it important to examine the interactive
effects of social-spatial associations in future work.

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 51
Conclusion
The results of these studies are consistent with our hypotheses that (1) people recruit from spatial
representations to make power judgments of other people in rich and complex visual environments; (2)
Americans are exposed to a pattern in which men are depicted higher in space than women; and (3)
exposure to this pattern influences how perceivers think about women and men. Male spatial elevation
may be both prevalent and influential in American culture.

SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER STEREOTYPES 52
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