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

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...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social psychological & personality science 2019-03, Vol.10 (2), p.152-159
Main Authors: Alt, Nicholas P., Goodale, Brianna, Lick, David J., Johnson, Kerri L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Perceptions
Priming
Sex ratio
Social perception
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:1948-5506
1948-5514
DOI:10.1177/1948550617731498