Using a U.S. census-matched sample of Democrats and Republicans (n = 826), the study experimentally varied whether a vignette’s gender cue appeared early as a noun (around the 3rd–4th word) or later as a pronoun (around the 10th word) while participants rated the wrongness of authority vs. justice violations. Republicans rated authority violations as worse when the actor was introduced as a “girl/woman” early rather than neutrally with gender revealed later, Democrats showed the opposite direction (harsher for “boy/man”), and there were no comparable effects for justice violations—critically, the stereotype effect could be removed by delaying gender information about 6–7 words, implying that small, timing-sensitive wording choices can meaningfully attenuate bias in surveys, media framing, and institutional judgment contexts.

In the United States at the time the study was fielded (late August 2023), Democrats and Republicans were described as occupying sharply differentiated cultural-psychological profiles, with Democrats more aligned to progressive egalitarian priorities and Republicans more aligned to tradition, order, and in-group norm enforcement. These differences were understood as being amplified by selective media consumption and social-identity dynamics, such that partisans increasingly experienced the opposing party as threatening and partisan identity became tightly bound to self-concept. Consistent with this backdrop, the paper situates its hypotheses in U.S. moral-psychology findings that conservatives place relatively greater moral weight on authority/loyalty/sanctity, whereas liberals place relatively greater weight on harm and injustice.