Attentional Processes in Social Perception

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe how a simple attentional mechanism can account for a wide variety of phenomena in social perception. According to Attention Theory (Kruschke, 1996, 2003), people preferentially attend to differentiating information in order to maximize category learning. When learning multiple social categories, people attend to all features that characterize the first-learned category but shift their attention to features that uniquely distinguish a later-learned category from the first. As a result, they form a stronger impression of the later-learned social category. First, we review research on attentional processes in stereotype formation and group categorization. We show how Attention Theory can account for both category accentuation and illusory correlation in the formation of majority and minority group stereotypes. We then explain how attention shifting influences face perception and racial categorization. Second, we describe attentional processes as they relate to context-based impression formation and the influence of individual-and group-based expectancies on context-based impressions. Last, we discuss implications for impression change.

Repeating stereotypes: Increased belief and subsequent discrimination

“…However, a critical difference between these studies and the present approach was that the positive evaluative information was redundant. That is, the second tribe or the second brand showed similar positive information and the primacy effect was predictable from attention theory, whereby novel information has an advantage over redundant information (Sherman et al., 2009; Huang & Sherman, 2018). Here, in both experiments, the second group showed distinct evaluative information, either on another dimension of social perception (i.e., communion vs. agency), or on the relevance for the job dimension (i.e., relevant vs. irrelevant).…”

An Eye Tracking Study of Gender Biased Information Acquisition in Candidate Evaluation

“…One reason that people pursue this strategy is because stereotypeinconsistent information is viewed as inconsequential and "uninformative about the true nature of the target" (Bastian and Haslam, 2007). This is in particular true for minority groups; when thinking about members of minority groups, people tend to focus on stereotypical traits that distinguish these members from members of the majority group (Huang and Sherman, 2018).…”

Cinsiyetçiliği Azaltmaya Yönelik Müdahale Çalışmalarına İlişkin Eleştirel Bir Değerlendirme ve Bir Sınıflandırma Önerisi

“…Individuals are prone to remember the stereotypic information more robustly (Berthold, Steffens, & Mummendey, 2019;Huang & Sherman, 2018). For instance, a new manuscript in a Turkish sample showed that traits such as "talkative" were more robustly bound with women actors, and inferences were made in a gender stereotypic way by more sexist participants (Soylu, 2017).…”