The degree to which perceivers automatically attend to and encode social category information was investigated. Event-related brain potentials were used to assess attentional and working-memory processes on-line as participants were presented with pictures of Black and White males and females. The authors found that attention was preferentially directed to Black targets very early in processing (by about 100 ms after stimulus onset) in both experiments. Attention to gender also emerged early but occurred about 50 ms later than attention to race. Later working-memory processes were sensitive to more complex relations between the group memberships of a target individual and the surrounding social context. These working-memory processes were sensitive to both the explicit categorization task participants were performing as well as more implicit, task-irrelevant categorization dimensions. Results are consistent with models suggesting that information about certain category dimensions is encoded relatively automatically.Categorization is widely viewed as a sensible and efficient way to order and simplify a complex social world (Bodenhausen & Macrae, 1998;Brewer, 1988;Fiske & Neuberg, 1990;Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000), but when applied to people, the process itself might not be so simple. This is because people can often be classified simultaneously along multiple dimensions. A complete understanding of social categorization must address how such multiply categorizable individuals are assigned to social group membership. Toward this end, some have suggested that all categories relevant to an impression-formation target are activated in parallel when multiply categorizable individuals are perceived (Bodenhausen & Macrae, 1998;Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000;Macrae, Bodenhausen, & Milne, 1995). Others have suggested that this automatic activation occurs more narrowly for certain wellpracticed dimensions such as race, gender, and age (Brewer, 1988;Bruner, 1957;Fiske & Neuberg, 1990;Stangor, Lynch, Duan, & Glass, 1992). Regardless of the specific categories afforded automatic status, both assumptions have important implications: To the extent that beliefs and affective reactions are associated with social categories, automatic activation of social category judgments would make this information readily available to influence subsequent processing stages.Although much has been learned about the ease with which stereotypes and prejudice are activated, less is known about the categorization process itself and the degree to which it occurs automatically. This may be attributable in part to the difficulty in measuring early attentional processes. It is not obvious, for instance, that perceivers would be able to accurately report when social category information becomes available and the relative importance of different dimensions at very early stages of processing. Consequently, when categorization has been studied, it has sometimes been assessed indirectly through outcomes such as stereotype activation (e.g., Macrae et al., 1995). C...

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Is uniform color related to aggressive behavior? Prior research has produced mixed results comparing the effects of black (vs. colored) uniforms on aggressive penalties in the National Hockey League (NHL), and the effect of white (vs. colored) uniforms remains unexamined. Luckily, the NHL has conducted multiple quasi-experiments with uniform (jersey) color over time. To examine the color-aggression link, the authors analyzed the last 25 seasons of NHL penalty-minute data (649 seasons from 30 teams collapsed across 52,098 games). When teams wore black jerseys, they were penalized more than when they did not (d ¼ 1.19; Study 1). When teams switched to wearing colored jerseys at home games, they were penalized more than when they wore white jerseys at home games (d ¼ 0.83; Study 2). Collectively, these quasi-experimental findings suggest that black jerseys are associated with more aggression and that white jerseys are associated with less. The authors discuss possible causes for these color-aggression effects.