Coordinating Sensory and Social Processes

As you walk down a busy street, you happily glance around, momentarily glimpsing dozens if not hundreds of other people. As decades of research have shown, a mere glimpse of these individuals allows you to to place each of them quickly and efficiently into a number of relevant social categories. Most important, it seems, are sex, race, age, and emotion (Calder, Young, Perrett, Etcoff, & Rowland, 1996; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000), although it is becoming increasingly clear that other, more ambiguous categories may be automatically extracted as well, such as sexual orientation (Rule, Macrae, & Ambady, 2009). All this information may be availed to perceivers in just a fraction of a second. In the laboratory, for example, if a participant is asked explicitly to categorize a face by sex, response latencies generally hover around a half a second (e.g., Quinn & Macrae, 2005). Of course, reaction time tasks are accompanied by a large motor component (all the time required to convert cognitive representations into a hand movement), and eventrelated potential (ERP) findings suggest that such categorizations may be cognitively furnished within even shorter time periods (e.g., Freeman, Ambady, & Holcomb, 2010; Ito & Urland, 2003). Regardless, perceivers are able to extract categorical information rapidly from other people with impressive ease, so much so that the process appears to be mandatory. It is only recently that social psychologists have become concerned with the perceptual processes culminating in social categorization. Traditionally, the focus has been on the consequences of categorization and the host of cognitive, affective, and behavioral effects that ensue. Consider, for example, two influential models of impression formation, Fiske and Neuberg’s (1990) continuum model and Brewer’s (1988) dualprocess model. According to these models, from some array of available cues arises a dominant categorization (e.g., black), which then exerts a host of influences on impressions, memory, and behavior. It automatically activates related stereotypes (Devine, 1989), albeit conditionally (Gilbert & Hixon, 1991; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000), which then bias impressions in ways that are often stereotypically consistent. This categorybased responding, however, may be tempered by a number of factors, such as attention or motivation. With the help of such intervening factors, these models posit that perceivers may move beyond categories and begin to rely more on individuating information, such as the observation that the target person pushed her friend. In general, these models argue that perceivers by default resort to categorybased responding, presumably because it maximizes cognitive efficiency and streamlines the demands of social interaction (also see C h a p t e r 16