Social Categorization From Faces: Evidence From Obvious and Ambiguous Groups
نویسنده
چکیده
People use facial features (e.g., face shape, skin color, eye structure) both in isolation and in combination to identify others as members of a variety of social categories. For some categories (e.g., age, race, and sex), the markers are obvious and people categorize their members almost perfectly. For others, however (e.g., political affiliation, religious following, and sexual orientation), the markers are ambiguous, yet people can still categorize members of these groups with better than chance accuracy and little effort or awareness. Here, we describe how people categorize others into both perceptually obvious and perceptually ambiguous social groups from their faces, discussing potential mechanisms that may underlie categorization accuracy and noting some of the social consequences that result from categorizing other people into groups.
منابع مشابه
Ambiguous group membership is extracted automatically from faces.
To economize the demands of person perception, individuals quickly and accurately categorize others into groups (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). Indeed, for groups with salient perceptual markers (e.g., sex, age, race), category activation is deemed to be an unavoidable consequence of the person-perception process (Bargh, 1999; Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). But what about social groups wit...
متن کاملOn the Perception of Religious Group Membership from Faces
BACKGROUND The study of social categorization has largely been confined to examining groups distinguished by perceptually obvious cues. Yet many ecologically important group distinctions are less clear, permitting insights into the general processes involved in person perception. Although religious group membership is thought to be perceptually ambiguous, folk beliefs suggest that Mormons and n...
متن کاملBrief exposures : Male sexual orientation is accurately perceived at 50 ms q Nicholas O . Rule * , Nalini Ambady
People have proved adept at categorizing others into social categories, at least when the categorical distinction is perceptually obvious (e.g., age, race, or gender). There remain many social groups whose boundaries are less clear, however. The current work therefore tested judgments of an ambiguous social category (male sexual orientation) from faces shown for durations between 33 ms and 10,0...
متن کاملAccuracy and awareness in the perception and categorization of male sexual orientation.
For clear and unambiguous social categories, person perception occurs quite accurately from minimal cues. This article addresses the perception of an ambiguous social category (male sexual orientation) from minimal cues. Across 5 studies, the authors examined individuals' actual and self-assessed accuracy when judging male sexual orientation from faces and facial features. Although participants...
متن کاملShort-latency category specific neural responses to human faces in macaque inferotemporal cortex
In this article I would present evidence to show that timing of the flow of neural signals within the ventral visual stream is a crucial part of the neural code for categorization of faces. We recorded the activity of 554 inferotemporal neurons from two macaque monkeys performing a fixation task. More than 1000 object images including human and non-primate animal faces were presented up to 10 t...
متن کامل