Abstract
How do people imagine a generic “person”? Who comes to mind by default shapes downstream decisions, with harmful consequences when one gender stands in for everyone. Existing work finds that people often imagine a “person” as a man more than a woman. However, prior research is limited almost exclusively to Western adults, leaving the origins and development of these representations unknown. We examined two novel cultures with very different gender structures. In the unique and hard-to-reach matrilineal Mosuo society, both men and women showed a stable tendency to imagine a “person” as someone of their own gender. In a mainstream Chinese sample, boys and men imagined a “person” as a man, whereas for girls and women representations shifted across age groups and increasingly towards a male default. These results show that male defaults are not a given: Initial own-gender biases are reshaped to a male-generic model through culturally-specific factors.