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

社会心理学研究的一个重要领域是了解刻板印象和歧视的根源。招聘、薪酬和晋升方面的差异是如何产生的？差异可能部分源于个人与特定角色的原型期望之间的不一致，甚至在面部特征的层面上也是如此。当目标的特征符合他人的期望或原型时，他们对角色的感知适应性就会增强。当一个具有更多女性特征的人申请一个典型的女性工作时，例如，儿童保育提供者，或者一个具有更多典型亚洲特征的人寻求进入一个与亚裔美国人相关的刻板印象领域，例如，科学/技术/工程/数学（STEM）研究生项目，这可能会发生。那些微妙的面部特征偏离这些期望的人可能不得不努力证明他们比那些更原型的人更适合这些职位。这项拟议的研究将检验我们观察、理解和分类他人的基本方式背后的认知机制是否会影响这种现实世界的社会行为。换句话说，在对他人进行分类的过程中，偏见是如何导致具有人际和社会意义的下游结果的，比如招聘和录取决策以及投票行为？研究者Jonathan Freeman（纽约大学）和他的同事们之前的研究表明，对个体进行分类的过程是动态的，在几百毫秒内就会进化。例如，指定性别、种族和年龄的线索在知觉流的早期被处理，但随着更多信息的积累，最初的试探性知觉逐渐变得尖锐，直到最终的分类最好地整合了所有线索。研究者开发的鼠标跟踪软件可以实时跟踪这一过程，确定当一个人对另一个人进行分类时，如何激活和解决多个冲突类别（例如，“白色”和“黑色”）。这项技术将用于研究那些面部特征与其性别或种族稍微不典型的个体如何触发竞争的社会类别（例如，“男性”和“女性”），以及这种认知竞争如何预测下游的社会行为。拟议的研究将首先检查当竞争的社会类别被激活时潜在的分类过程，然后将这一基础知识扩展到几个与社会相关的结果，包括基于性别和/或种族线索的分类如何导致不同的招聘和录取决定。最后，这些分类决策的神经基础将被检查，以测试如何认知和神经动力学共同预测重要的行为。总之，这项研究有可能通过建立实时认知和现实世界社会动态之间的联系，使用尖端的方法来跨越个人感知的多个时间尺度，从而在社会心理学方面取得变革性进展。这些发现将揭示基于外貌的刻板印象背后的过程及其与社会行为的联系，并对减少现实世界中歧视的影响具有许多意义。

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.