Collaborative Research: Social Perception of Groups

在日常生活中，人们经常遇到不认识的人，他们倾向于根据他们的社会类别成员身份来分类，例如性别(即，男性、女性)、种族(例如，黑人、白人、亚洲人等)和情感(例如，快乐、愤怒)。这些知觉仅仅是对一张脸或身体的一瞥就会迅速产生，往往会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人的感知上。然而，在日常生活中，我们经常会遇到其他人成群结队，而不是孤立。关于人们如何快速而准确地形成对群体的印象，我们知之甚少。这项拟议的研究建立在最近的理论进步的基础上，以测试个人如何感知群体。这项研究将为观察者如何形成有意义的印象，从而影响他们对他人的判断、决定和行为提供重要的见解。本研究对社会知觉、刻板印象和视觉知觉研究具有重要意义。这项研究测试了关于群体社会认知基础的机制的假设。一组实验通过检查群体组成的变化、群体成员的外表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组成(例如男性和女性的比例)的方法。另一组实验测试了一组成员如何被感知为亚组和个体(即视觉同化或对比度)。其他实验通过试图了解观察者如何评估群体来探索这些模式的后果，从而得出结论，即一个群体可能对感知者怀有敌意或好客。最后一组实验试图测试社会中自然出现的群体(例如，公司董事会成员、大学院系教员名单和科学会议上的小组成员)的群体感知机制。这项研究将有助于我们理解群体的社会知觉。这项研究阐明了群体和背景如何有助于或解释群体刻板印象。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.