Stereotypes shape response competition when forming impressions

Abstract

Dynamic models of impression formation posit that bottom-up factors (e.g., a target's facial features) and top-down factors (e.g., perceiver knowledge of stereotypes) continuously interact over time until a stable categorization or impression emerges. Most previous work on the dynamic resolution of judgments over time has focused on either categorization (e.g., "is this person male/female?") or specific trait impressions (e.g., "is this person trustworthy?"). In two mousetracking studies-exploratory (N = 226) and confirmatory (N = 300)-we test a domain-general effect of cultural stereotypes shaping the process underlying impressions of targets. We find that the trajectories of participants' mouse movements gravitate toward impressions congruent with their stereotype knowledge. For example, to the extent that a participant reports knowledge of a "Black men are less [trait]" stereotype, their mouse trajectory initially gravitates toward categorizing individual Black male faces as "less [trait]," regardless of their final judgment of the target.

Keywords: dynamic interactive models; mousetracking; person perception; stereotyping.

Figure 1.

Time-Normalized Trajectories by Stereotype Knowledge and Response Note. Red and blue lines represent the average trajectories for trials in the upper and lower tertiles of stereotype scores. Tertiles are for visualization purposes only. Points along the red and blue lines represent the 101 time-normalized steps. Gray lines represent individual trajectories. Note. Please refer to the online version of the article to view this figure in colour.

Figure 2.

Time-Normalized Trajectories by Stereotype Knowledge and Response Note. Red and blue lines represent the trajectories for trials in the upper and lower tertiles of stereotype scores. Tertiles are for visualization purposes only. Points along the red and blue lines represent the 101 normalized time steps. Gray lines represent individual trajectories. Note. Please refer to the online version of the article to view this figure in colour.

Figure 3.

Density Plots for Area Under the Curve Across Stereotype Knowledge Scores Note. Distributions of area under the curve scores were approximately the same across levels of stereotype knowledge score (i.e., the participants’ reported stereotype knowledge for a given race-by-gender category).

Figure 4.

Stereotype Knowledge by Race and Gender Note. Scores show the extent to which participants indicated that each race × gender group was stereotypically perceived as each of the six traits. Black error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.