Pronouns often convey information about a person's social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender nonbinary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode (if any) and why. Across four studies, participants were asked to evaluate different types of real and hypothetical pronouns, including binary gender pronouns, race pronouns, and identity-neutral pronouns. We sampled speakers of two languages with different pronoun systems: English (N = 1,120) and Turkish (N = 260). English pronouns commonly denote binary gender (e.g., "he" for men), whereas Turkish pronouns are identity-neutral (e.g., "o" for anyone). Participants' reasoning about pronouns reflected both a familiarity preference (i.e., participants preferred the pronoun type used in their language) and-critically-participants' social ideologies. In both language contexts, participants' ideological beliefs that social groups are inherently distinct (essentialism) and should be hierarchal (social dominance orientation) predicted relatively greater endorsement of binary gender pronouns and race pronouns. A preregistered experimental study with an English-speaking sample showed that the relationship between ideology and pronoun endorsement is causal: Ideologies shape attitudes toward pronouns. Together, the present research contributes to linguistic and psychological theories concerning how people reason about language and informs policy-relevant questions about whether and how to implement language changes for social purposes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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人们对代词的信念反映了他们所说的语言和他们的意识形态。


代词通常传达有关一个人的社会身份的信息（例如性别）。因此，代词已成为学术和公共辩论中关于代词是否应该改变为更具包容性的焦点，例如对于身份不符合当前代词惯例的人（例如，性别非二元个体）。在这里，我们通过调查哪些社会身份的非专业人士认为代词应该编码（如果有的话）以及原因，为这些争论做出了实证贡献。在四项研究中，参与者被要求评估不同类型的真实和假设代词，包括二元性别代词、种族代词和身份中立代词。我们对使用不同代词系统的两种语言的使用者进行了抽样调查：英语 (N = 1,120) 和土耳其语 (N = 260)。英语代词通常表示二元性别（例如，“he”代表男性），而土耳其语代词是身份中立的（例如，“o”代表任何人）。参与者对代词的推理既反映了熟悉性偏好（即参与者更喜欢其语言中使用的代词类型），又反映了参与者的社会意识形态。在这两种语言环境中，参与者认为社会群体本质上是不同的（本质主义）并且应该是等级制的（社会统治取向）的意识形态信念预示着对二元性别代词和种族代词的相对更大的认可。一项针对英语样本的预先注册实验研究表明，意识形态与代词背书之间存在因果关系：意识形态塑造对代词的态度。 总之，目前的研究对关于人们如何推理语言的语言和心理学理论做出了贡献，并为有关是否以及如何为了社会目的实施语言变革的政策相关问题提供了信息。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。