Previous research has demonstrated that people hold implicit associations regarding gender; for example, men are implicitly associated with power and women with status (Townsend et al., 2024). Others have found associations regarding psychological distance; for example, greater distance is associated with abstract concepts and certain social behaviors, such as mask-wearing (Bar-Anan et al., 2006; Fatfouta & Trope, 2022). This study combines these lines of work by exploring whether there is an association between gender and psychological distance. Specifically, we examine whether people associate men and women with distance and proximity across four forms of psychological distance: temporal, spatial, social, and hypothetical distance. We conducted five pre-registered studies to test this question: four implicit association tests (IATs) and one measure of participants’ explicit associations. Our findings indicate that women are consistently associated with proximity and men with distance across all four distance dimensions, and these associations are further moderated by participants’ gender. These results help us better understand descriptive gender stereotypes and their potential implications in interpersonal and organizational contexts.
