Inferring category attributes from exemplar attributes: Geometric shapes and social categories.

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that judgments about the attributes of categories are disproportionately based on the characteristics of exemplars that fit the category. In the first 2 experiments, subjects were presented with good and bad exemplars of categories with defining attributes (rectangles, triangles, pentagons, and ellipses) in which different colors were arbitrarily paired with the good and poor exemplars. In both experiments, subjects erroneously judged the colors paired with the good exemplars as more frequent than colors paired with the poor exemplars. A third experiment, using social categories, examined whether attributes associated with a single category member were more likely to generalize to the category as a whole for prototypical than for nonprototypical category members. Subjects were presented with information about individual fraternity members who varied in prototypicality, and the tendency to infer a target behavior (liberal vs. conservative voting behavior) from the individual fraternity member to the fraternity as a whole increased with the prototypicality of the category member. Implications for the contact hypothesis, category–exemplar relations, and belief stability are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Race and gender on the brain: Electrocortical measures of attention to the race and gender of multiply categorizable individuals.

The degree to which perceivers automatically attend to and encode social category information was investigated. Event-related brain potentials were used to assess attentional and working-memory processes on-line as participants were presented with pictures of Black and White males and females. The authors found that attention was preferentially directed to Black targets very early in processing (by about 100 ms after stimulus onset) in both experiments. Attention to gender also emerged early but occurred about 50 ms later than attention to race. Later working-memory processes were sensitive to more complex relations between the group memberships of a target individual and the surrounding social context. These working-memory processes were sensitive to both the explicit categorization task participants were performing as well as more implicit, task-irrelevant categorization dimensions. Results are consistent with models suggesting that information about certain category dimensions is encoded relatively automatically. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Limitations of exemplar models of multi-attribute probabilistic inference.

Observers were presented with pairs of objects varying along binary-valued attributes and learned to predict which member of each pair had a greater value on a continuously varying criterion variable. The predictions from exemplar models of categorization were contrasted with classic alternative models, including generalized versions of a "take-the-best" model and a weighted-additive model, by testing structures in which interactions between attributes predicted the magnitude of the criterion variable. Under typical training conditions, observers showed little sensitivity to the attribute interactions, thereby challenging the predictions from the exemplar models. In a condition involving highly extended training, observers eventually learned the relations between the attribute interactions and the criterion variable. However, an analysis of the observers' response times for making their paired-comparison decisions also challenged the exemplar model predictions. Instead, it appeared that most observers recoded the interacting attributes into emergent configural cues. They then applied a set of hierarchically organized rules based on the priority of the cues to make their decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depression and the impression-formation continuum: Piecemeal processing despite the availability of category information.

A study explored depressed–nondepressed differences in impression formation. From S. T. Fiske and S. L. Neuberg's (1990) model of impression formation, mildly depressed perceivers were hypothesized to engage in more piecemeal processing when forming an impression of a target other, even when nondepressed perceivers would typically use less effortful, categorical processing. With an idiographic technique designed by M. A. Pavelchak (see record 1989-18928-001), depressed Ss were shown to use trait attributes in evaluating a person, even when induced to categorize the individual. Nondepressed Ss relied on category information when available, replicating Pavelshak's study. Depressed Ss' results are interpreted as arising from a motivation to engage in effortful analysis of social information, stemming from feelings of lack of control over life events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Categorical and contextual bases of person memory and stereotyping.

In 3 studies, a total of 207 White university summer school students observed slide and type portrayals of interacting small groups that were of mixed sex or mixed race. Hypotheses were that (a) social perceivers encode person information by race and sex; (b) this fact leads to minimizing within-group and exaggerating between-group differences; (c) perceivers stereotype accordingly; (d) within-group attributes, both stereotyped and nonstereotyped, are exaggerated in inverse proportion to the size of the minority subgroup; (e) better discriminations are made within smaller subgroups; (f) imputations of attributes to groups as a whole are also sensitive to the makeup of the group; and (g) all these behaviors are attenuated when the perceiver is a member of the subgroup evaluated. All but the last hypothesis received at least partial support. Results are discussed in terms of categorization processes and suggest that normal cognitive processes explain the process of stereotyping quite well. (32 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inferring the popularity of an opinion from its familiarity: A repetitive voice can sound like a chorus.

Despite the importance of doing so, people do not always correctly estimate the distribution of opinions within their group. One important mechanism underlying such misjudgments is people's tendency to infer that a familiar opinion is a prevalent one, even when its familiarity derives solely from the repeated expression of 1 group member. Six experiments demonstrate this effect and show that it holds even when perceivers are consciously aware that the opinions come from 1 speaker. The results also indicate that the effect is due to opinion accessibility rather than a conscious inference about the meaning of opinion repetition in a group. Implications for social consensus estimation and social influence are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Structural properties of stereotypic knowledge and their influences on the construal of social situations.

This research focused on the role that higher order structural properties of stereotypic knowledge play in the processing of social information. It is argued that stereotypic assumptions about cause–effect relations provide important constraints for the causal structure underlying the perceiver's subjective representation of social information. Experiment 1 shows how, within the context of a jury decision experiment, the causal structure underlying stereotypic knowledge about African Americans influences the construal of causality in a situation involving a member of that group. Results from 2 additional experiments indicate that this construal effect is based in part on stereotypic knowledge affecting the encoding of the trial evidence instead of on biasing responses at the output stage. The implications of these findings are discussed, and a theoretical framework is offered according to which the application of category knowledge involves not only the matching of stereotypic attributes but also the alignment of structural relations in the environment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory for in-group and out-group information in a minimal group context: The self as an informational base.

The authors argue that persons derive in-group expectancies from self-knowledge. This implies that perceivers process information about novel in-groups on the basis of the self-congruency of this information and not simply its valence. In Experiment 1, participants recalled more negative self-discrepant behaviors about an in-group than about an out-group. Experiment 2 replicated this effect under low cognitive load but not under high load. Experiment 3 replicated the effect using an idiographic procedure. These findings suggest that perceivers engage in elaborative inconsistency processing when they encounter negative self-discrepant information about an in-group but not when they encounter negative self-congruent information. Participants were also more likely to attribute self-congruent information to the in-group than to the out-group, regardless of information valence. Implications for models of social memory and self-categorization theory are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Culture and the construal of agency: Attribution to individual versus group dispositions.

The authors argue that cultures differ in implicit theories of individuals and groups. North Americans conceive of individual persons as free agents, whereas East Asians conceptualize them as constrained and as less agentic than social collectives. Hence, East Asian perceivers were expected to be more likely than North Americans to focus on and attribute causality to dispositions of collectives. In Study 1 newspaper articles about "rogue trader" scandals were analyzed, and it was found that U.S. papers made more mention of the individual trader involved, whereas Japanese papers referred more to the organization. Study 2 replicated this pattern among U.S. and Hong Kong participants who responded to a vignette about a maladjusted team member. Study 3 revealed the same pattern with respect to individual and group dispositionism using a different design that compared attributions for an act performed by an individual in one condition and by a group in the other condition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Influence and inference: What the active perceiver overlooks.

We propose that perceivers who engage in social influence tasks (inducers) concentrate primarily on the relation between their influencing behaviors and the responsive behaviors of their target and ignore other important sources of information relevant to social inference (e.g., other concurrent sources of influence on the target person). As a result, inducers' inferences about the target person are biased by their own personal power. In Experiment 1, weak inducers drew more dispositional inferences about the targets of their influence attempts than did strong inducers when the magnitude of the inducers' power was revealed in the course of the social interaction, but not when inducers were informed about the magnitude of their power prior to the social interaction. These results suggest that inducers concentrated on information that they considered relevant to the assessment of their personal power and ignored information about concurrent sources of influence on the target person's behavior. In Experiment 2, inducers' judgments were unaffected by the presence or absence of information about concurrent sources of influence, whereas observers' judgments were significantly affected. The results of both experiments suggest that active perceivers, who are immersed in the social interactions they seek to interpret, differ from passive perceivers in a variety of theoretically predictable ways. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual models of social behavior.

Presents a technique that extracts individual models of social behavior. Such models reflect each individual's ideas about what social behaviors are interrelated, and what aspects of social situations are linked to different levels of probability that particular patterns of social behavior will occur. The method was used in 2 studies, one with bicultural Ss (1 American, 6 Latin Americans, 2 Hong Kong Chinese, and 1 Greek) and the other with 22 monocultural Mexican and Chinese Ss and 8 of the bilinguals from the 1st study. For each S, factor analysis of the judgments concerning the probability of occurrence of specific social behaviors in specific social situations provided information of how the S linked social behaviors. ANOVA on the factor scores provided information about the S's beliefs concerning how attributes of social situations are linked to social behaviors. Inspection of the individual models of social behavior indicated that some common elements across models are probably linked to culture. The technique has wide applicability for social and personality psychology because it permits idiographic comparison of models of social behavior across individuals who share some attribute. (39 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strategies for Social Inference: A Similarity Contingency Model of Projection and Stereotyping in Attribute Prevalence Estimates.

Most models of how perceivers infer the widespread attitudes and qualities of social groups revolve around either the self (social projection, false consensus) or stereotypes (stereotyping). The author suggests people rely on both of these inferential strategies, with perceived general similarity moderating their use, leading to increased levels of projection and decreased levels of stereotyping. Three studies featuring existing individual differences in perceived similarity as well as manipulated perceptions supported the predictions, with similarity yielding increased projection to, and decreased stereotyping of, various in-groups and out-groups. Evidence that projection and stereotyping may serve as inferential alternatives also emerged. The model and accompanying results have implications for research on social comparison and projection, stereotyping and prejudice, and social inference. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Piecemeal and category-based evaluation: An idiographic analysis.

Provides the clearest evidence to date for 2 distinct person evaluation processes: 1 based on liking for person attributes and 1 based on social categorization. The processes were induced by stimulus design and experimenter suggestion. An idiographic technique was developed to empirically distinguish between the processes, whereby Ss categorized stimuli as they saw fit and indicated their liking for person attributes (personality traits) and social categories (academic majors). Both idiographic and nomothetic evidence for 2 evaluation processes was obtained. Also, individual differences and stable normative patterns were observed in how stimulus persons were categorized. Contrary to expectation, the degree of fit of stimulus to schema did not relate to the degree to which evaluations were category based. Implications for models of evaluation processing and directions for future research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The automaticity of emotion recognition.

Evolutionary accounts of emotion typically assume that humans evolved to quickly and efficiently recognize emotion expressions because these expressions convey fitness-enhancing messages. The present research tested this assumption in 2 studies. Specifically, the authors examined (a) how quickly perceivers could recognize expressions of anger, contempt, disgust, embarrassment, fear, happiness, pride, sadness, shame, and surprise; (b) whether accuracy is improved when perceivers deliberate about each expression's meaning (vs. respond as quickly as possible); and (c) whether accurate recognition can occur under cognitive load. Across both studies, perceivers quickly and efficiently (i.e., under cognitive load) recognized most emotion expressions, including the self-conscious emotions of pride, embarrassment, and shame. Deliberation improved accuracy in some cases, but these improvements were relatively small. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for the cognitive processes underlying emotion recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of suspicion on attributional thinking and the correspondence bias.

This research examined why suspicion of ulterior motives leads perceivers to avoid the correspondence bias in the assigned-essay paradigm, in contrast to information about situational constraint. Five experiments offer converging evidence that suspicion triggers active, sophisticated attributional thinking. These studies examined participants' spontaneous thoughts and attributional analyses in the context of high-constraint or ulterior-motives conditions. The studies (a) suggest that high-constraint information and ulterior-motive information have divergent effects on perceivers early in the inference process, (b) demonstrate the correspondence bias in instances in which demand characteristics are minimized, and (c) show that the effects of suspicion can endure across targets and contexts. The implications of these results for current models of the correspondence bias and the dispositional inference process, and suggestions for a revised model, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Category-based predictions: Influence of uncertainty and feature associations.

Four experiments examined how people make inductive inferences using categories. Subjects read stories in which 2 categories were mentioned as possible identities of an object. The less likely category was varied to determine if people were using it, as well as the most likely category, in making predictions about the object. Experiment 1 showed that even when categorization uncertainty was emphasized, subjects used only 1 category as the basis for their prediction. Experiments 2–4 examined whether people would use multiple categories for making predictions when the feature to be predicted was associated to the less likely category. Multiple categories were used in this case, but only in limited circumstances; furthermore, using multiple categories in 1 prediction did not cause subjects to use them for subsequent predictions. The results increase the understanding of how categories are used in inductive inference. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing alternative explanations of behavior: Correction or integration?

Three experiments investigated how activation of knowledge about situational forces affects discounting in dispositional inference tasks. Each experiment varied a different knowledge activation factor—salience, accessibility, or specificity of situational information. In addition, all 3 experiments varied situational demands and cognitive load. The results showed that cognitive load eliminated discounting when situational information was low in salience, accessibility, or specificity. However, when situational information was more salient, accessible, or specific, it produced strong discounting effects even when perceivers were under cognitive load. These results are discussed in terms of correction and integration models of dispositional inferences from behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Environmental and personal determinants of support perceptions: Three generalizability studies.

The extent to which perceived social support reflects characteristics of the environment, the personality of the perceiver, and their interaction is unknown. This article shows how the methods of generalizability theory can be used to address these questions. When participants rate the same targets on the targets' supportiveness, generalizability theory provides methods for determining the extent to which support judgments are determined by effects due to targets (supporters), perceivers, and their interaction. In 3 studies, each source of variance made significant contributions to support judgments, with the Perceivers?×?Supporters interaction, characteristics of supporters, and biases of perceivers making the largest contributions, respectively. The implications for theoretical models of perceived support are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Environmental and personal determinants of support perceptions: Three generalizability studies.": Correction.

Reports an error in the original article by B. Lakey et al (Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 1996 [Jun], Vol 70(6), 1270–1280. On page 1274, the degrees of freedom for several of the terms were incorrectly reported. In addition, the first author's name in the reference citation for Gurung et al. (1994) on p. 1279 contained a typographical error. (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in record 1996-01769-014). The extent to which perceived social support reflects characteristics of the environment, the personality of the perceiver, and their interaction is unknown. This article shows how the methods of generalizability theory can be used to address these questions. When participants rate the same targets on the targets' supportiveness, generalizability theory provides methods for determining the extent to which support judgments are determined by effects due to targets (supporters), perceivers, and their interaction. In 3 studies, each source of variance made significant contributions to support judgments, with the Perceivers–Supporters interaction, characteristics of supporters, and biases of perceivers making the largest contributions, respectively. The implications for theoretical models of perceived support are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Traits and social stereotypes: Levels of categorization in person perception.

A theoretical distinction is made between trait categorization in person perception and categorization by means of well-articulated, concrete social stereotypes. Three studies test the prediction that social stereotypes are both more associatively rich and more distinctive than are trait-defined categories. In Study 1, subjects sorted adjectives related to extraversion and introversion. A cluster analysis using similarity measures derived from the sorting indicated that distinct social stereotypes were associated with each trait. This supports and extends earlier findings (Cantor & Mischel, 1979). In Study 2, subjects generated attributes of the trait categories and stereotypes that emerged in Study 1. More nonredundant attributes, especially visible features, were listed for the stereotypes than for the trait categories. Study 3 elicited the explicit associative structure of traits and related stereotypes by having subjects rate the association between a series of attributes (derived from the responses in Study 2) and each category label. Results showed that social stereotypes have distinctive features that are not shared with the related trait category, whereas trait categories share virtually all of their features with related stereotypes. The implications of the trait/stereotype distinction for social information processing are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)