Impressions at the intersection of ambiguous and obvious social categories: Does gay+Black=likable?

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o How do perceivers combine information about perceptually obvious categories (e.g., Black) with information about perceptually ambiguous categories (e.g., gay) during impression formation? Given that gay stereotypes are activated automatically, we predicted that positive gay stereotypes confer evaluative benefits to Black gay targets, even when perceivers are unaware of targets' sexual orientations. Participants in Study 1 rated faces of White straight men as more likable than White gay men, but rated Black men in the opposite manner: gays were liked more than straights. In Study 2, participants approaching Whites during an approach–avoidance task responded faster to straights than gays, whereas participants approaching Blacks responded faster to gays than straights. These findings highlight the striking extent to which less visible categories, like sexual orientation, subtly influence person perception and determine the explicit and implicit evaluations individuals form about others. Research has traditionally examined how perceptually obvious categories such as race, gender, and age influence the impressions people form about others (Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). Recent studies suggest, however, that less visible categories, such as sexual orientation and religion, are also nonconsciously extracted from faces. Perceivers exposed to faces of self-identified homosexuals and Mormons, for example, can accurately categorize targets at rates significantly better than chance automatic detection of perceptually ambiguous categories exemplifies the impressive range of person perception, but also raises questions regarding how people combine ambiguous categories with obvious categories when evaluating multiply-categorizable targets. Can less visible categories influence the meaning of more visible categories and shape whether perceivers appraise targets as likable? In two studies we tested whether a less obvious category (target sexual orientation) influences evaluative reactions to faces beyond the awareness of perceivers attending to a more obvious category (target race). To conceptualize how sexual orientation might modify race-based evaluations, we consulted research on how age, an obvious category, affects impressions of White and Black faces. Whereas negative traits are attributed to Blacks (e.g., hostility; Eberhardt et al., 2004), both positive and negative traits are attributed to older adults (e.g., rudeness and warmth; …