Jara-Ettinger and Dunham offer a powerful reframing of social cognition: in addition to a mentalistic stance, humans deploy an institutional stance that predicts and explains interaction by representing role structures and their rule-like entailments. This proposal captures how people navigate complex coordination without continuously constructing fine-grained models of individual minds. It also clarifies why institutional markers, such as uniforms, formal disclosures, and status-coded contexts, so reliably shape interpretation. The authors explicitly recognize a moral downside: institutional cognition can reduce attention to others’ mental and emotional lives, thereby lowering empathy and enabling dehumanization (Harris & Delgado, Reference Harris and Delgado2025). In our paper, we want to argue that this downside is not merely incidental but politically patterned in a way that matters directly for gender equality. In this context, it is significant that the first two examples illustrating the institutional position given by Jara-Ettinger and Dunham concern gender relations: the Kate–Eric nexus and the Laurie–Paul nexus.
We suggest that the institutional stance often operates as a gendered filter on mind perception and empathy. When interaction partners are processed primarily as interchangeable role occupants, we rely on role-based entailments (what the role is for and what it requires) rather than on the person’s lived experience, intentions, and vulnerability. In many institutional contexts, this substitution is efficient and benign. But in gender-coded domains including care, service, education, and especially administrative support, roles have historically been structured to minimize friction and maximize replaceability. Feminized work is often organized around norms of smoothness, emotional availability, and support, which can make the worker’s personhood less salient in interaction and the demands of others feel procedurally legitimate. The moral risk is not just instrumental treatment; it is the quiet conversion of a person into a function.
This is a distinctively cognitive pathway for reproducing inequality even when explicit sexist beliefs are absent. Feminist social ontology emphasizes that gender is not just an internal identity but a socially meaningful position that structures expectations, competencies, and entitlements across contexts. On conferralist views, being positioned as a woman is partly constituted by socially authorized patterns of treatment: others’ expectations, their perceived entitlements, and the harms they tend to treat as role appropriate. If so, the institutional stance is not only a tool for coordination. It is one mechanism by which gendered social meaning becomes cognitively automated: the stance stabilizes what fits the role and screens off the moral salience of the person behind it (Ásta, 2018).
Objectification provides a clear marker of what attenuated mentalizing removes from social perception. It is often operationalized as reduced mind attribution and moral status – less agency, less experience, and correspondingly thinner moral regard. In organizational settings, broader workplace objectification is treated as a systematic temptation: people are reduced to instruments for extrinsic goals, undermining their needs for control, belonging, and self-esteem. When institutions are designed to treat certain roles as infinitely substitutable while extracting affective labor, the institutional stance can make that design feel like a neutral social fact (Kellie, Blake, & Brooks, Reference Kellie, Blake and Brooks2019; Zhang, Wisse, & Lord, Reference Zhang, Wisse and Lord2025).
Jara-Ettinger and Dunham already suggest that institutional processing can lower empathy and facilitate dehumanization. Here, we add that we should expect this effect to be asymmetrically distributed along gendered lines. The more a setting is institutionally marked by procedures, hierarchy, and uniforms, the less observers will mentalize workers and the more they will treat dignity violations as deviations from role performance rather than harms done to a person. This is particularly evident in totalitarian organizations, where meetings, or more broadly, social interaction, are aimed at quickly creating an organizational identity that maintains and reproduces organizational systems of rules. The agenda of a meeting in a given environment will therefore not be an attempt to negotiate between a person’s current beliefs and their organizational role, but rather to exert a more or less nuanced, effective influence of the organization on that person’s life and identity (Howe & Hinderaker, Reference Howe and Hinderaker2018).
Moreover, this shift should be stronger for roles culturally coded as feminine, including especially reception, teaching, care coordination, service, than for masculinized roles because feminized roles are more likely to be socially framed as support and care functions whose success is measured by invisibility and compliance. Studies of feminized ancillary occupations, including receptionist work, highlight a recurring pattern: complex interpersonal skill is undervalued and rendered socially invisible, making it easier for institutions to erase the person by treating the work as peripheral (Cortis & Naidoo, Reference Cortis and Naidoo2025).
If this diagnosis is right, the normative upshot is not to reject institutional cognition, but to treat rehumanization as a problem of institutional design. Coordination need not be purchased at the price of mentalizing; institutional scripts can be arranged so that role-based processing does not routinely eclipse attention to persons. In practice, this points to small but durable shifts toward individuation and recognition: using names rather than role labels, adding brief perspective cues, and shaping interactional norms so that expectations of compliance and availability give way to more basic forms of acknowledgment. Experimental evidence also suggests that even relatively simple affective shifts, such as inducing gratitude, can reduce objectification in interpersonal and workplace contexts (Shi et al., Reference Shi, Wang, Teng and Chen2023). Framed this way, the central prediction is both descriptive and action guiding: where institutions introduce stable cues that make personhood salient within otherwise role-dominant settings, the institutional stance should dampen empathy less, and its gendered asymmetries should correspondingly recede.
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Jara-Ettinger and Dunham offer a powerful reframing of social cognition: in addition to a mentalistic stance, humans deploy an institutional stance that predicts and explains interaction by representing role structures and their rule-like entailments. This proposal captures how people navigate complex coordination without continuously constructing fine-grained models of individual minds. It also clarifies why institutional markers, such as uniforms, formal disclosures, and status-coded contexts, so reliably shape interpretation. The authors explicitly recognize a moral downside: institutional cognition can reduce attention to others’ mental and emotional lives, thereby lowering empathy and enabling dehumanization (Harris & Delgado, Reference Harris and Delgado2025). In our paper, we want to argue that this downside is not merely incidental but politically patterned in a way that matters directly for gender equality. In this context, it is significant that the first two examples illustrating the institutional position given by Jara-Ettinger and Dunham concern gender relations: the Kate–Eric nexus and the Laurie–Paul nexus.
We suggest that the institutional stance often operates as a gendered filter on mind perception and empathy. When interaction partners are processed primarily as interchangeable role occupants, we rely on role-based entailments (what the role is for and what it requires) rather than on the person’s lived experience, intentions, and vulnerability. In many institutional contexts, this substitution is efficient and benign. But in gender-coded domains including care, service, education, and especially administrative support, roles have historically been structured to minimize friction and maximize replaceability. Feminized work is often organized around norms of smoothness, emotional availability, and support, which can make the worker’s personhood less salient in interaction and the demands of others feel procedurally legitimate. The moral risk is not just instrumental treatment; it is the quiet conversion of a person into a function.
This is a distinctively cognitive pathway for reproducing inequality even when explicit sexist beliefs are absent. Feminist social ontology emphasizes that gender is not just an internal identity but a socially meaningful position that structures expectations, competencies, and entitlements across contexts. On conferralist views, being positioned as a woman is partly constituted by socially authorized patterns of treatment: others’ expectations, their perceived entitlements, and the harms they tend to treat as role appropriate. If so, the institutional stance is not only a tool for coordination. It is one mechanism by which gendered social meaning becomes cognitively automated: the stance stabilizes what fits the role and screens off the moral salience of the person behind it (Ásta, 2018).
Objectification provides a clear marker of what attenuated mentalizing removes from social perception. It is often operationalized as reduced mind attribution and moral status – less agency, less experience, and correspondingly thinner moral regard. In organizational settings, broader workplace objectification is treated as a systematic temptation: people are reduced to instruments for extrinsic goals, undermining their needs for control, belonging, and self-esteem. When institutions are designed to treat certain roles as infinitely substitutable while extracting affective labor, the institutional stance can make that design feel like a neutral social fact (Kellie, Blake, & Brooks, Reference Kellie, Blake and Brooks2019; Zhang, Wisse, & Lord, Reference Zhang, Wisse and Lord2025).
Jara-Ettinger and Dunham already suggest that institutional processing can lower empathy and facilitate dehumanization. Here, we add that we should expect this effect to be asymmetrically distributed along gendered lines. The more a setting is institutionally marked by procedures, hierarchy, and uniforms, the less observers will mentalize workers and the more they will treat dignity violations as deviations from role performance rather than harms done to a person. This is particularly evident in totalitarian organizations, where meetings, or more broadly, social interaction, are aimed at quickly creating an organizational identity that maintains and reproduces organizational systems of rules. The agenda of a meeting in a given environment will therefore not be an attempt to negotiate between a person’s current beliefs and their organizational role, but rather to exert a more or less nuanced, effective influence of the organization on that person’s life and identity (Howe & Hinderaker, Reference Howe and Hinderaker2018).
Moreover, this shift should be stronger for roles culturally coded as feminine, including especially reception, teaching, care coordination, service, than for masculinized roles because feminized roles are more likely to be socially framed as support and care functions whose success is measured by invisibility and compliance. Studies of feminized ancillary occupations, including receptionist work, highlight a recurring pattern: complex interpersonal skill is undervalued and rendered socially invisible, making it easier for institutions to erase the person by treating the work as peripheral (Cortis & Naidoo, Reference Cortis and Naidoo2025).
If this diagnosis is right, the normative upshot is not to reject institutional cognition, but to treat rehumanization as a problem of institutional design. Coordination need not be purchased at the price of mentalizing; institutional scripts can be arranged so that role-based processing does not routinely eclipse attention to persons. In practice, this points to small but durable shifts toward individuation and recognition: using names rather than role labels, adding brief perspective cues, and shaping interactional norms so that expectations of compliance and availability give way to more basic forms of acknowledgment. Experimental evidence also suggests that even relatively simple affective shifts, such as inducing gratitude, can reduce objectification in interpersonal and workplace contexts (Shi et al., Reference Shi, Wang, Teng and Chen2023). Framed this way, the central prediction is both descriptive and action guiding: where institutions introduce stable cues that make personhood salient within otherwise role-dominant settings, the institutional stance should dampen empathy less, and its gendered asymmetries should correspondingly recede.
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