Collaborative Research: Social Perception of Groups

在日常生活中，人们经常会遇到不认识的人，人们倾向于根据他们的社会类别成员来对他们进行分类，例如性别（即男性、女性）、种族（如黑人、白人、亚洲人等）和情绪（如快乐、愤怒）。这些感知仅仅从对面部或身体的一瞥中迅速产生，并且往往产生更具评估性的判断。先前关于观察者如何感知他人的研究主要集中在理解个体的感知上。然而，在日常生活中，我们经常以群体而不是孤立的方式遇到他人。人们是如何快速而准确地形成对群体的印象的，我们所知甚少。这项拟议中的研究建立在最近的理论进展的基础上，以测试个人如何看待群体。这项研究将为观察者如何形成影响他们对他人的判断、决定和行为的有意义的印象提供重要的见解。本研究对社会知觉、刻板印象和视觉知觉的研究具有重要意义。这项研究测试了关于群体社会感知机制的假设。一组实验通过检验群体组成的变化、群体成员的外貌和观察者的视觉行为如何影响群体感知的准确性，来测试观察者准确感知群体构成的手段（例如，男女比例）。另一组实验测试一个群体的成员如何被视为子群体和个体（即视觉同化或对比）。其他的实验探索了这些模式的后果，试图理解观察者是如何评价群体的，从而推断出一个群体对观察者可能是敌对的，也可能是友好的。最后一组实验旨在测试社会中自然存在的群体（例如，公司董事会成员、大学院系的教员名册和科学会议的小组成员）的群体感知机制。这项研究将有助于我们对群体的社会认知的理解。该研究阐明了群体和环境如何促成或解释群体刻板印象。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

In daily life, people regularly encounter unknown others, and they tend to categorize them in terms of their social category memberships, such as sex (i.e., male, female), race (e.g. , Black, White, Asian, etc. ), and emotion (e.g., happy, angry). These perceptions occur rapidly from merely a glimpse of a face or body and often produce judgments that are more evaluative in nature. Prior research examining how observers perceive others focused largely on understanding the perception of individuals. In daily life, however, we often encounter others in groups rather than in isolation. Little is known about how people quickly and accurately form impressions of groups. The proposed research builds on recent theoretical advances to test how individuals perceive groups of people. This research will provide important insights about how observers form meaningful impressions that impact their judgments, decisions, and behaviors about others. This research has important implications for social perception, stereotyping, and vision perception research. The research tests hypotheses about the mechanisms that underlie the social perception of groups. One set of experiments tests the means by which observers accurately perceive a group’s composition (e.g., the ratio of men to women) by examining how variations in group composition, the physical appearance of group members, and the visual behavior of observers impact the accuracy of group percepts. Another set of experiments tests how members of a group are perceived as sub-groups and individually (i.e. visual assimilation or contrast). Other experiments explore the consequences of these patterns by seeking to understand how groups are evaluated by observers, leading to inferences that a group might be either hostile or hospitable to the perceiver. A final set of experiments seeks to test the mechanisms of group perception for groups that occur naturally in society (e.g., members of corporate boards, faculty rosters from university departments, and panelists at scientific conferences). This research will contribute to our understanding of the social perception of groups. The research illuminates how groups and contexts can contribute to or explain group stereotypes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.