Linking Real-Time Categorization Dynamics to Real-world Social Dynamics

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A seminal area of social psychological research is in understanding the root causes of stereotyping and discrimination. How might disparities in hiring, pay, and promotions arise? Disparities could stem, in part, from perceived incongruities between an individual and a prototypical expectation for a particular role, even at the level of facial features. When a target's features fit others' expectations or prototypes, their perceived suitability for the role could be enhanced. This might occur when an individual with more feminine features applies for a stereotypically feminine job, e.g., child care provider, or an individual with more prototypically Asian features seeks entry into a field stereotypically associated with Asian-Americans, e.g., a science/technology/engineering/math (STEM) graduate program. Individuals whose subtle facial features deviate from these expectations may have to struggle to demonstrate their suitability for such positions over and above others who are more prototypical. The proposed research will examine whether the cognitive mechanisms underlying the basic ways we see, understand, and categorize other people influence such real-world social behaviors. In other words, how can biases in the process of categorizing others lead to downstream outcomes of interpersonal and societal significance, such as hiring and admission decisions and voting behavior? Previous work by the investigator Jonathan Freeman (New York University) and colleagues has shown that the process of categorizing individuals is dynamic and evolves over hundreds of milliseconds. For instance, cues specifying gender, race, and age are processed early in the perceptual stream, but as more information accumulates, initial tentative perceptions are gradually sharpened until a final categorization that best integrates all cues stabilizes. Mouse-tracking software developed by the investigator can track this process in real-time, determining how multiple conflicting categories (e.g., "white" and "black") may be activated and resolved while an individual categorizes another person. This technique will be used to examine how individuals whose facial features are slightly atypical for their gender or race may trigger competing social categories (e.g., "male" and "female"), and how such cognitive competition may predict downstream social behavior. The proposed research will first examine processes underlying categorization when competing social categories are activated, and then extend this foundational knowledge to several societally-relevant outcomes, including how categorization on the basis of gender and/or racial cues lead to different hiring and admission decisions. Finally, the neural basis of these categorization decisions will be examined, to test how cognitive and neural dynamics jointly predict important behaviors. Together, this research has the potential to make transformative advances in social psychology by establishing links between real-time cognitive and real-world social dynamics, using cutting-edge methodologies to bridge multiple time scales in person perception. The findings will expose the processes underlying appearance-based stereotyping and their links to social behavior, and have numerous implications for reducing the effects of discrimination in the real world.