Policing Gender Nonconformity: Negative evaluations of people with nonconventional pronouns

This study examines how pronoun sharing affects evaluations of people who use nonconventional pronouns in collaborative settings. Drawing on normative discrimination theory, the investigators tested whether sharing nonconventional pronouns (e.g., they/them, or binary pronouns paired with a gender-incongruent name) leads to negative perceptions of interpersonal qualities and penalties in how a person is evaluated as a potential teammate. The preregistered experiment was conducted in December 2023. It was fielded on Prolific with a national sample of 1,697 U.S. adults, constructed to approximate the U.S. population on binary sex, age, and political affiliation, with an oversample of Black and Hispanic respondents. Participants were randomly assigned to evaluate a fictitious college student profile in which the student's name (Amy, Brian, or Jamie) and pronouns (she/her, he/him, they/them, or no pronouns) were independently varied across twelve conditions. Participants rated the student's perceived warmth, interpersonal demandingness, agenticism, competence, and similarity to themselves, as well as their comfort working with the student and their assessment of the student as a teammate. The survey also collected open-ended responses about participants' impressions of the student and their views on pronoun-sharing practices. We also collected information about participants' gender identity, sex assigned at birth, age, race/ethnicity, education, region, political orientation, political party, prior experience with pronoun-sharing practices, and personal acquaintance with transgender or nonbinary individuals.<br>