Humanness as Social Normativity: Neural Evidence that Humanized Faces Align with Gender Schemas

Perceptions of humanness are deeply intertwined with social norms, yet the specific theoretical link between humanness and gender normativity, a primary form of social normativity, remains insufficiently understood. Across four studies (N = 686), we investigated whether humanized faces are implicitly processed as more gender-normative. Study 1 (n = 400) revealed that higher humanness ratings predicted stronger femininity evaluations for female faces and stronger masculinity evaluations for male faces. Study 2 (n = 161), employing a drawing projective test, demonstrated that highly humanized mental prototypes exhibited more gender-typed traits. In Study 3 (n = 92), mouse-tracking revealed that lower Maximum Deviation (MD), an indicator of greater decisional certainty, was linked to evaluations consistent with gender schemas. Study 4 (n = 25) provided electrophysiological evidence: in masculinity-evaluation tasks, low-humanness female faces elicited enhanced N170 and LPP amplitudes, indicating increased structural encoding and motivated attention. In femininity-evaluation tasks, low-humanness faces evoked larger P300, suggesting counter-stereotypic processing. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that humanness perception reinforces gender normativity, as reflected in distinct neural signatures.