Keeping Track of Speaker's Perspective: The Role of Social Identity

A long and narrow piece of wood is “a bat,” “a stick,” “a club,” or “firewood.” In fact, anything can be described from multiple perspectives, each suggesting a different conceptualization. People keep track of how speakers conceptualize things and expect them to describe them similarly in the future. This article demonstrates that these expectations are partly based on the speaker's social identity. Participants watched speakers describe objects. In Experiment 1, people expected a female speaker to use another female's, rather than a male's, term. In Experiment 2, participants misattributed a term to a speaker more within a gender category than between genders, demonstrating that such expectations stem from source monitoring. Experiment 3 showed that source confusion is not due only to similarity among individuals, but also to their social category: Salient gender exacerbated gender-based misattributions. Together, these results show that people keep track of speakers' conceptualizations partly via their social identity.