Observing shifts in others' eye gaze causes perceivers to shift their own attention in the same direction, and such gaze following has been regarded as reflexive. We hypothesized that effects of social hierarchy on reflexive gaze following are driven largely by power asymmetries. We used a standard gaze-cuing paradigm with 100 and 300 ms stimulus onset asynchronies. In Study 1, we compared gazers with a historically privileged social identity (European American/"White") to gazers with a historically underprivileged social identity (African American/"Black"). White gazers elicited gaze following from both White and Black perceivers, whereas Black gazers only elicited gaze following from Black perceivers. In Study 2, we examined the role of perceiver power in these effects by experimentally manipulating felt power. White gazers elicited gaze following from both high-power and low-power White perceivers whereas Black gazers only elicited gaze following from low-power White perceivers. These results suggest that felt power may play a key role in stratified and interracial gaze following.

Drawing from research on social identity and ensemble coding, we theorize that crowd perception provides a powerful mechanism for social category learning. Crowds include allegiances that may be distinguished by visual cues to shared behavior and mental states, providing perceivers with direct information about social groups and thus a basis for learning social categories. Here, emotion expressions signaled group membership: to the extent that a crowd exhibited emotional segregation (i.e., was segregated into emotional subgroups), a visible characteristic (race) that incidentally distinguished emotional subgroups was expected to support categorical distinctions. Participants were randomly assigned to view interracial crowds in which emotion differences between (black vs. white) subgroups were either small (control condition) or large (emotional segregation condition). On each trial, participants saw crowds of 12 faces (6 black, 6 white) for roughly 300 ms and were asked to estimate the average emotion of the entire crowd. After all trials, participants completed a racial categorization task and self-report measure of race essentialism. As predicted, participants exposed to emotional segregation (vs. control) exhibited stronger racial category boundaries and stronger race essentialism. Furthermore, such effects accrued via ensemble coding, a visual mechanism that summarizes perceptual information: emotional segregation strengthened participants' racial category boundaries to the extent that segregation limited participants' abilities to integrate emotion across racial subgroups. Together with evidence that people observe emotional segregation in natural environments, these findings suggest that crowd perception mechanisms support racial category boundaries and race essentialism. (PsycINFO Database Record

People are good at categorizing the emotions of individuals and crowds of faces. People also make mistakes when classifying emotion. When they do so with judgments of individuals, these errors tend to be negatively biased, potentially serving a protective function. For example, a face with a subtle expression is more likely to be categorized as angry than happy. Yet surprisingly little is known about the errors people make when evaluating multiple faces. We found that perceivers were biased to classify faces as angry, especially when evaluating crowds. This amplified bias depended on uncertainty, occurring when categorization was difficult, and it reached peak intensity for crowds with four members. Drift diffusion modeling revealed the mechanisms behind this bias, including an early response component and more efficient processing of anger from crowds with subtle expressions. Our findings introduce bias as an important new dimension for understanding how perceivers make judgments about crowds.

Causal influences of culture on cognition are challenging to examine scientifically. We here introduce a method to address this challenge.Cultural snapshots enable scientists to (a) characterize the cultural information commonly and frequently encountered by a collective, (b) examine how such cultural information influences the cognitions of individuals, and (c) draw conclusions about the emergence of shared cognition. Specifically, cultural snapshots are recorded samples of public environments commonly encountered by many people. Television scenes, photographs of public spaces, magazine pages, and social media conversations are all examples of cultural snapshots. Representative sets of cultural snapshots can be coded to index the systematic patterns of information encountered by a collective (i.e., cultural patterns). These same materials can be used to experimentally manipulate those cultural patterns, allowing scientists to examine cultural influences on cognition and behavior. We here review and provide guidelines for cultural snapshots research, trace cultural snapshots to classic theories of culture, and describe how cultural snapshots balance the constraints of representative design (Brunswik, 1956) with those of causal inference. We then illustrate how this approach is used to address (a) questions of causality in cultural psychology and (b) questions of applicability in social cognition research. We conclude by evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the approach.1 | INTRODUCTION People see things, hear sounds, and smell odors and, through such perceptions, develop knowledge of the world that exists beyond their bodies. But in what sense could people literally perceive culture and thus develop knowledge about it? We suggest that culture is perceived over time in quantifiable patterns of observed behaviors, artifacts, and utterances; these cultural patterns may then influence individual humans' cognitions, including cognition about culture. Cultural patterns are necessarily embedded in the sensory chaos of daily life, and it is this embedding that makes culture perceptually rich and irreducible to conceptual description. For example, Americans who have a common racial identity may tend to behave more positively toward each other than people without a common racial identity but this statement is only a conceptual description of a cultural pattern. Real cultural patterns are instantiated Psychology, and elsewhere. With his postdoctoral mentor, Nalini Ambady, Max co-authored the nonverbal communication chapter of the most recent version of the Handbook of Social Psychology. He is currently Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Denver. Sarah A. Lamer is a PhD student at the University of Denver in the social psychology program. Her primary research interest is examining if and how subtle sociocultural cues can reinforce and challenge social inequities, shape individual values, and inform lay theories. She holds a BA in Psychology from Connecticut College with an emphasis in Public Policy a...

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