Mostly US participants. The person perception models are silent regarding cultural differences. Not sure how your suggested default tendency would explain discrepancies within the same population of participants, between long existing and novel social groups.

We are not suggesting what perceivers should do, but test what they actually do, given the two types of information

Thanks for the input!!
This is a test of the models in the context of novel groups, no prior knowledge of the perceivers. Discrepancy from prior findings with long-existing groups can be attributed to confounding boundary conditions, such as specific motivations or extrapersonal associations

- We used highly salient group cues (skin tone)
- We instructed participants to form group-based impressions
- We tested both more and less automatic evaluations (via indirect and self-report measures)
- We improved the structural fit of our measures and experimental paradigm

Let’s discuss: How should person perception models evolve given this evidence?

#SocialPsychology #PersonPerception #ImpressionFormation #Prejudice #Stereotypes #ImplicitBias #JESP

This overturns familiar assumptions of perceivers as “cognitive misers” and calls for rethinking how we conceptualize automatic evaluations.

Even with skin tone as a group marker and explicit instructions to form group-based impressions, people relied more on the actual characteristics of the individual they encountered.

The result?
Across the board, individuating information outweighed group information -- not only for more controlled, less automatic evaluations, but also for automatic evaluations!

Building on a provocative finding by Navon & Bar-Anan (2023), we designed two large-scale experiments (Ns = 605, 657) that address previous methodological limitations and tested which information dominates less\more automatic evaluations of individual group members

This project could not have happened without the incredible collaboration of Profs. Carmel Sofer, Bat-Sheva Hadad & @talmoran.bsky.social, former lab members Adi Langer & Hadas Wardi, and especially the amazing post-docs @mayanna.bsky.social & @maayantrzewik.bsky.social who co-led the project. 🙌