Threat in the Company of Men: Ensemble Perception and Threat Evaluations of Groups Varying in Sex Ratio

Abstract

Everyday, we visually perceive people not only in isolation but also in groups. Yet, visual person perception research typically focuses on inferences made about isolated individuals. By integrating social vision and visual ensemble coding, we present novel evidence that (a) perceivers rapidly (500 ms) extract a group’s ratio of men to women and (b) both explicit judgments of threat and indirect evaluative priming of threat increase as the ratio of men to women in a group increases. Furthermore, participants’ estimates of the number of men, and not perceived men’s coalition, mediate the relationship between the ratio of men to women and threat judgments. These findings demonstrate the remarkable efficiency of perceiving a group’s sex ratio and downstream evaluative inferences made from these percepts. Overall, this work advances person perception research into the novel domain of people perception, revealing how the visually perceived sex ratio of groups impacts social judgments.

Hard to disrupt: Categorization and enumeration by gender and race from mixed displays

“…Our findings are consistent with past research on face perception that shows people's ability to perceive gender and race from faces (e.g., Alt et al, 2017;Freeman et al, 2010;Lamer et al, 2018;Thornton et al, 2019;Zarate & Smith, 1990). In our research, we further explored the sensitivity of this effect and showed the change in face perception abilities across manipulations and comparisons with simpler stimuli.…”

“…Our findings show that people have the ability to not merely attend to, but also rapidly extract the social identities contained in crowds. This ability might well be useful when navigating complex visual scenes, such as walking through a crowded square, but it may also lead to less positive outcomes such as the perception of threat when the crowd composition trends towards negatively stereotyped categories (e.g., Alt et al, 2017). This ability also plausibly relates to the more general ability to extract meaningful summary statistics from complex scenes (e.g., Haberman & Whitney, 2011); in this case, the summary statistics are the approximate numeric magnitude of various social category constituencies.…”

“…People have the visual mechanism to extract summary statistical information from visual scenes, including emotions, diversity, and hierarchy from faces (e.g., Haberman & Whitney, 2009;Phillips, Slepian, & Hughes, 2018). For gender categorization, people can rapidly perceive the sex ratio of a mixed-sex display, and this ratio further affects judgments of threat (Alt, Goodale, Lick, & Johnson, 2017) and social attitudes (Goodale, Alt, Lick, & Johnson, 2018), as well as perceiver's sense of belonging (Goodale et al, 2018). For race categorization, people can perceive the average race (e.g., Jung, Bülthoff, & Armann, 2017) and estimate the majority race (Thornton, Srismith, Oxner, & Hayward, 2019) from arrays of faces, and perceive difference in average emotions between two racial subgroups in a mixed-race display (Lamer, Sweeny, Dyer, & Weisbuch, 2018), implying that they encode the racial identity of the constituent faces.…”

“…Because the locations of faces, the total number of faces, which subgroup is being asked about, and the number of faces in the subgroup all change from trial to trial, participants face the daunting task of rapidly extracting category information and estimating the numerosity of the relevant subgroup. This reflects a more difficult test than past work has included (past studies fix the total number and locations of faces, and/or ask for a majority estimate instead of numerosity estimate; see Alt et al 2017;Goodale et al, 2018;Lamer et al, 2018;Thornton et al, 2019), but also one that more closely maps onto complex and dynamic real scenes. After establishing participants' basic ability to extract race and gender numerosities, we go on to examine the specific features that enable this categorization/enumeration ability (or put differently, what manipulations would disrupt categorization/enumeration).…”

Making Sense of Other People’s Encounters: Towards an Integrative Model of Relational Impression Formation

“…But how are rapid social impressions formed, and which consequences do they have, when perceivers witness groups of strangers (cf. Alt et al 2017;Haberman and Whitney 2007)? Are strangers seen in dyads, triads, or even larger social gatherings evaluated differently from strangers seen by themselves?…”