That asshole

For a question with so much riding on it—does using politically correct language actually make a person less of a jerk?—the test was deceptively simple.

Here’s what you do: Show people a sketch of a cartoon person—circle-for-head, ovals for arms and body—with a dotted line linking it to an equally cartoony thing, a balloon-animal dog. Over the person’s head loom two thought bubbles, a round one containing three question marks and a jagged one with three exclamation points. That’s it. And the test is, describe what’s happening.

Importantly, the people being tested, upwards of 2,000 of them, were all native speakers of Swedish, an old language that has learned a new trick. Like English, Swedish used two pronouns to indicate the gender of a person, hon (she) and han (he). But in 2012, a new word dropped into Swedish discourse: hen, a nongendered pronoun that could replace either or both.

So this was the real test. Would native-speaker Swedes, seven years after getting a new pronoun plugged into their language, be more likely to assume this androgynous cartoon was a man? A woman? Either, or neither? Now that they had a word for it, a nonbinary option, would they think to use it?

And they did. Not only did the Swedish speakers use the nonbinary optionto describe the, let’s face it, nonbinary human, but in other surveys they deployed hen (as well as han, but the feminine hon, too) to describe people in stories when their genders weren’t specified. Now, it’s true the researchers don’t have comparable tests from before 2012, before hen. So this result is, as UCLA political psychologist Efrén Pérez says, merely suggestive. Still, though, “this word has no biological associations. It’s from scratch. And it’s performing the way some proponents argued it would,” says Pérez, coauthor of a paper describing these tests in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “These language changes can nudge people in directions some folks find normatively worthy.”

And he then said “wow, I’m sorry, I’ve never met a girl named dave before! Now I’ve seen everything.”

And he then said “wow, I’m sorry, I’ve never met a girl named dave before! Now I’ve seen everything.”

Artist: Ira.exe

Date: 2018

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