The Role of Grammatical Gender and Religiosity in Shaping Implicit Gender Attitudes: An Investigation Into Dari and Pashto Languages

Author

Muhammad Ali Shahidy, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

12-1-2024

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Lakshmanan, Usha

Abstract

This thesis contributes to the ongoing debate on the relationship between language and cognition by evaluating the impact of language-specific features, such as grammatical gender, on non-linguistic cognitive processes like implicit gender attitudes. Grammatical gender is a formal linguistic feature that categorizes nouns into classes such as masculine and feminine (with some languages, like Russian, having more than two gender categories) based on linguistic rules, including morphology and phonology. Previous studies have highlighted the influence of grammatical gender on various cognitive abilities, such as object categorization, semantic categorization, or gender perception. However, little attention has been given to the effect of grammatical gender on sexism and gender bias, with existing studies relying solely on explicit measures (e.g., Wasserman & Weseley, 2009). This thesis addresses this gap by examining the role of grammatical gender in implicit gender bias in two languages spoken in Afghanistan: Dari, a genderless language, and Pashto, a language with grammatical gender. The study employed the Gender-Career version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) (Greenwald et al., 1988), which measures implicit biases by assessing the strength of associations between target concepts and attributes based on response times. It was predicted that, after controlling for age, sex, and religiosity, L1 gender-type (Dari vs. Pashto) would significantly explain the variation in gender bias, with Pashto speakers exhibiting higher implicit gender bias than Dari speakers.To conduct this study, two online experiments were designed on Qualtrics: one in Dari and one in Pashto. Each experiment was comprised of a Consent Form, a Participant Background Questionnaire with items related to participants’ linguistic background, the Muslim Religiosity Scale, the IAT, and a debriefing statement. A total of 96 Afghan participants were recruited through flyers distributed on social media platforms—57 completed the Dari experiment, and 39 completed the Pashto experiment. A hierarchical regression analysis was conducted to examine the effect of Age, Sex, Religiosity, and L1-Gender type on participants' implicit gender bias measured by the IAT. Model 1 of the analysis comprising Age and Sex revealed that Sex, but not Age, was the only significant predictor, with male participants showing lower IAT scores compared to female participants. Model 2, which added Religiosity, showed that Religiosity was not a significant predictor of the IAT scores while Sex remained a significant predictor. Finally, Model 3 which introduced the primary independent variable, L1-Gender type, revealed that L1-Gender type emerged as the only significant predictor of variance in IAT scores with Pashto speakers exhibiting lower IAT scores compared to Dari speakers while other predictor variables (Age, Sex, and Religiosity) remained non-significant. Contrary to the study predictions, the results revealed that the Pashto language, a language with grammatical gender, leads to less gender bias compared to Dari, a language without a grammatical gender system. These findings challenge the current assumptions about the role of grammatical gender on gender attitudes and biases. Returning to the link between language and cognition, the findings of the present study support the modularity account of cognition showing that there is no direct impact of linguistic structures on general cognitive processes such as gender perception and bias.