Who or what are you?: Facial orientation and person construal

An extensive literature has documented the cognitive benefits that accrue from a categorical conception of others. While informative, this work has overlooked the fact that, prior to the application of categorical thinking as an economizing cognitive tool, perceivers must first extract category-triggering information from available facial cues. What this suggests is that an impetus to construe others categorically may reside in the perceptual operations that guide the preliminary stages of person understanding. This possibility was explored in three experiments that investigated the effects of stimulus rotation on the efficiency of identity-based and category-based construal. In the first experiment, sex categorization was compared directly to identity-based construal. Subsequent experiments then investigated the efficiency of sex (Experiment 2) and race (Experiment 3) categorization when critical category-specifying facial cues were present and absent. The results demonstrated that categorical responding is driven by the extraction of featural information from faces, a finding that informs recent theoretical accounts of person perception. Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. After several decades of empirical inquiry, few would challenge the observation that categorical thinking often dominates the products of the person-perception process (Bodenhausen & Macrae, 1998; Brewer, 1988; Fiske &Neuberg, 1990; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). By thinking about others, not on the basis of their idiosyncratic qualities and attributes, but rather in terms of the social groups to which they belong, perceivers can streamline and economize otherwise complex aspects of social-cognitive functioning (Allport, 1954). Supporting this viewpoint is an extensive literature that documents the utility of categorical thinking at various stages of the person-perception process. In a by no means exhaustive list of reported effects, categorical thinking has been shown to facilitate impression formation, simplify memorial encoding, and preserve attentional resources (e.g., Bodenhausen & Wyer, 1985; Macrae, Bodenhausen, Schloerscheidt, & Milne, 1999; Macrae, Milne, & Bodenhausen, 1994). Put simply, the economizing influence of categorical thinking is apparent during most stages of person perception. ent of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Moore Hall, [email protected] s, Ltd. Received 6 September 2006 Accepted 14 February 2007 Person construal 1299 Conventional wisdom asserts that categorical thinking is the favored strategy in person perception primarily because it spares perceivers the trouble of thinking deeply about others. In a world of booming, buzzing confusion (Allport, 1954), the rapid and efficient solutions that categorical thinking provides are frequently sufficient to satisfy people’s immediate processing needs and concerns. From this standpoint, then, categorical thinking serves a decidedly cognitive function, in that it streamlines attention, memory, and response generation (Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). But is cognitive economy the only reason that categorical thinking exerts such a prominent influence on the products of person construal? We suspect not. Prior to the activation (and application) of generic knowledge structures in memory, perceivers must first extract critical category-triggering information from available stimulus inputs, usually facial cues (Bruce & Young, 1986; Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2000). That is, perceptual operations precede the cognitive effects that are the hallmark of categorical thinking. It is possible, therefore, that these perceptual operations may also contribute to the dominance of category-based responding during the person-perception process (Blair, Judd, & Fallman, 2004; Livingston & Brewer, 2002; Maddox & Gray, 2002). PERCEPTUAL PROCESSING AND CATEGORICAL THINKING Notwithstanding continued interest in the cognitive underpinnings of categorical thinking (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000), recent work has directed attention to the perceptual determinants of category-based responding (Blair et al., 2004; Cloutier, Mason, & Macrae, 2005; Livingston & Brewer, 2002; Maddox & Gray, 2002; Quinn & Macrae, 2005). One avenue of exploration, for example, has shown that category activation is sensitive to the typicality of group members. In particular, categorical thinking is modulated by the extent to which individuals possess facial features that are deemed to be typical of the groups to which they belong (Blair et al., 2004; Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, & Davies, 2004; Livingston & Brewer, 2002; Locke, Macrae, & Eaton, 2005; Maddox & Gray, 2002). A second, related line of research has demonstrated that the functional characteristics of early perceptual operations contribute to people’s tendency to view others in a categorical manner. Across three experiments, Cloutier et al. (2005) showed that the extraction of identity-based knowledge from faces (i.e., individuation) is less resistant to manipulations of processing difficulty (i.e., facial inversion, facial blurring, rapid presentation) than the extraction of categorical information (i.e., categorization), a finding that underscores the efficiency of the perceptual operations through which categorical thinking is initiated (Bruce & Young, 1986). The efficiency of person categorization under taxing processing conditions, such as stimulus inversion, can be traced to the facial information that supports categorical judgments (Cloutier et al., 2005). When considering the information that can be extracted from faces, an important functional distinction has been drawn between featural and configural encoding operations. Whereas featural operations code the constituent elements of faces (e.g., nose, eyes, hairstyle), configural operations code the spatial relations among features of the face (see Maurer, Le Grand, & Mondloch, 2002). Generally speaking, categorical judgments are supported by the extraction of single features from the face, such as a person’s hairstyle in the case of sex categorization (Brown & Perrett, 1993; Goshen-Gottstein & Ganel, 2000; Macrae & Martin, in press). This is not the case for person identification (i.e., individuation), however. Instead, the extraction of configural information (i.e., second-order featural relations) subserves people’s ability to recognize others (see Maurer et al., 2002). Under normal viewing conditions (i.e., upright faces), perceivers experience little difficulty extracting either categorical or identity-related information from faces (Cloutier et al., 2005; Mason & Macrae, 2004). When faces are inverted (i.e., rotated through 1808), however, decrements in performance are Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 37, 1298–1309 (2007)