In this episode of PPLS Perspectives, Madeline Horner sits down with Dr April Bailey, lecturer in Social Psychology and leader of the Bailey Identity and Social Cognition Lab. Together, they explore April’s research on how we think about “people” — and why, often without realising it, we tend to imagine a man rather than a woman. The conversation spans methods from reaction-time tasks to large-scale language models, considers cross-cultural and intersectional perspectives, and reflects on what these hidden biases mean for science, policy, and society more broadly. When we think of a person, we tend to think of a man more than a woman — and that subtle bias matters, because it shapes how we make decisions in the real world. Dr April Bailey Lecturer in Social Psychology Listen on Spotify Watch on YouTube Watch on MediaHopper This episode's guestsDr April Bailey April is a lecturer in Psychology. She also co-organises the Gender Preconference to the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). I completed my PhD training at Yale University followed by a two-year postdoctoral research position at New York University. Before coming to Edinburgh, I taught courses covering statistics and social group biases at Yale University and the University of New Hampshire. Madeleine HornerMadeleine is a psychology PhD student working in cognitive science at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the causal role of care and empathy in our intuitive theories of prosocial behaviour. Related linksDr April Bailey Based on billions of words on the internet, people = menImplicit androcentrism: Men are human, women are genderedIntersectional Male-Centric and White-Centric Biases in Collective Concepts“Master” of none: Institutional language change linked to reduced gender bias This article was published on 2026-02-10
