… Her. It’s a three-letter pronoun that, despite the seemingly endless debate over whether a woman can become president, feels relatively benign. But what if its use, or an unconscious aversion to its use, had some small power to influence voter perception? Could something as simple as a pronoun reflect, or even affect, the way voters understand power?
That’s the question raised by the research, conducted by cognitive scientists and linguists at M.I.T., the University of Potsdam and the University of California, San Diego, who surveyed people during the run-up to the 2016 election. Wanting to understand how world events might influence language, the researchers hypothesized that the possibility a woman would be elected president at that time might override the implicit bias people had toward referring to the president as “he.” CONT.
Jessica Bennett, New York Times