“Being unable to identify with one's group—that is, in the demographics section of a survey—may signal social-identity devaluation, eliciting negative affect (e.g., anger) and increasing the importance of the omitted identity to group members' sense of self.” TLDR new psych research says the more you remove identity choices from surveys, forms, general society, etc, the more folks will cling to them.
Devaluation by Omission: Limited Identity Options Elicit Anger and Increase Identification - PubMed
In the present research, we explored social-identity threat caused by subtle acts of omission, specifically situations in which social-identity information is requested but one's identity is not among the options provided. We predicted that being unable to identify with one's group-that is, in the d …
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov