Social Psychology of Visual Perception

Emily Balcetis, G. Daniel Lassiter

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781138982260
• eBook ISBN: 9781136945526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This volume takes a contemporary and novel look at how people see the world around them. We generally believe we see our surroundings and everything in it with complete accuracy. However, as the contributions to this volume argue, this assumption is wrong: people's view of their world is cloudy at best.

Social Psychology of Visual Perception is a thorough examination of the nature and determinants of visual perception, which integrates work on social psychology and vision. It is the first broad-based volume to integrate specific sub-areas into the study of vision, including goals and wishes, sex and gender, emotions, culture, race, and age.

The volume tackles a range of engaging issues, such as what is happening in the brain when people look at attractive faces, or if the way our eyes move around influences how happy we are and could help us reduce stress. It reveals that sexual desire, our own sexual orientation, and our race affect what types of people capture our attention. It explores whether our brains and eyes work differently when we are scared or disgusted, or when we grow up in Asia rather than North America.

The multiple perspectives in the book will appeal to researchers and students in range of disciplines, including social psychology, cognition, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience.

Section I
Motivation and the Social Psychology of Visual Perception

1
Ambiguity and Social Perception

KRISTIN PAUKER, NICHOLAS O. RULE, and NALINI AMBADY

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit. (James, 1890/1983, p. 416)

People routinely make judgments based on social categories (i.e., categories that place an individual within a larger social group such as sex, race, sexual orientation, religion, occupation), and are quite adept at extracting others’ social category memberships (Bruce & Young, 1998; Cloutier, Mason, & Macrae, 2005; Macrae, Quinn, Mason, & Quadflieg, 2005). However, not all social categories are easily discernible. Some social categories are concealed, whereas other visually identifiable social categories may be obscured by conflicting cues or contexts. Whether making a judgment based on a concealed identity (e.g., sexual orientation) or a social identity with a mixture of cues (e.g., multiracial), both judgments involve construing a category based on ambiguous perceptual cues. Do the perceptual and cognitive processes underlying social categorization function for ambiguous social targets just as they do for perceptually obvious targets? We propose that although perceivers are surprisingly accurate at construing the identity of these ambiguous targets despite their “degraded” informational input, such construals are often constrained by additional cues, such as the context of the surrounding environment or the perceiver’s motivation. In particular, perception of facial cues that mark these social categories may be particularly susceptible to top-down influences as identity cues become increasingly ambiguous.

The initial step of determining whether someone is a “friend or foe” is often taken for granted in most social psychological research. With perceptually obvious categories, facial category cues are strongly associated with one category construal; however, with ambiguous social categories, category cues may be associated with multiple categories, allowing for contextual input and motivational factors to exert their influence in resolving this ambiguity. Indeed, this crucial step of category construal may set the stage with regard to whom we attend to or how we “see” an individual. We review evidence for motivational influences in perception, focusing on the malleability of face perception across several stages of visual perception. Additionally, we discuss the implications that such fluidity in perception has downstream, particularly with regard to face memory. Overall, we illustrate the malleable nature of social perception, where both higher-order social cognition (e.g., personal motivations, cultural associations, and contexts) and bottom-up perceptual operations collaborate in tandem to produce our routine sights and interpretations of the social world.

ACCURACY IN CONSTRUING PERCEPTUALLY AMBIGUOUS SOCIAL CATEGORIES

Most person perception research, to date, has focused on groups whose perceptual boundaries are marked by obvious and explicit cues. Indeed, distinctions between individuals of different ages, races, and genders are typically so apparent that these categories are often considered to be special classes that humans are innately predisposed towards perceiving (e.g., Brewer, 1988). Among these “Big 3” categories, then, it is very difficult to discuss the capacity for accurate perception because discrimination of individuals into groups is so facile. Emerging work, however, has begun to demonstrate the perceptibility of individuals belonging to groups that are not as perceptually distinct. This examination of perceptually ambiguous groups allows for potential insight regarding the capacity and limits of our ability to perceive and construe others.

Early studies investigating the question of accuracy in perceiving group membership examined the perceptibility of Jewish from non-Jewish individuals (see Rice & Mullen, 2003 for review). This research showed that perceivers could distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish individuals with accuracy that was significantly greater than chance from photos (e.g., Allport & Kramer, 1946) and live observations (e.g., Lund & Berg, 1946). Both perceptual context and perceiver identity showed important effects: Carter (1948) found that Jewish individuals were discriminable from non-Jewish individuals when contrasted against either Northern Europeans (high perceptual distinction) or Mediterraneans (low perceptual distinction). Additionally, Scodel and Austrin (1957) found that Jewish perceivers were more accurate than non-Jewish perceivers. A central focus among this work was the impact of anti-Semitism, or prejudice against Jewish people, on individual perceivers’ accuracy and response bias in distinguishing Jewish from non-Jewish individuals. The data were mixed, however, with some studies showing a positive relationship between accuracy and anti-Semitism (e.g., Dorfman, Keeve, & Saslow, 1971) and others showing no relationship between accuracy and anti-Semitism (e.g., Quanty, Keats, & Harkins, 1975).

A more recently studied perceptually ambiguous group is sexual orientation. Ambady, Hallahan, and Conner (1999) demonstrated that dynamic nonverbal cues allow for above-chance accuracy in perceiving sexual orientation (see also Johnson, Gill, Reichman, & Tassinary, 2007). Recently, Rule and Ambady (2008) showed that static, facial cues also allow for accuracy in judging male sexual orientation and that exposures to faces as brief as 50 milliseconds are sufficient for making accurate categorizations. Moreover, longer exposures (as long as 10,000 milliseconds and including self-paced judgments, which averaged about 1,500 milliseconds) were no more accurate than the very brief, 50 millisecond exposures. Critically, subliminal presentations of the faces at 33 milliseconds did not allow for accurate perceptions, suggesting a supraliminal threshold for accurate judgments.

Investigation into the facial features that contribute to such judgments showed that targets’ hair, eyes, and mouth independently provided information that was distinctive for male sexual orientation, and the accuracy of judgments based on faces without these features was at chance (Rule, Ambady, Adams, & Macrae, 2008). Interestingly, however, perceivers were able to estimate the accuracy of their judgments when deciding based on hairstyles but were unable to estimate the accuracy of their judgments when deciding based on the eyes or mouth. That is, participants’ postdicted accuracy, or estimated accuracy about their prior judgment performance, significantly correlated with the actual accuracy of their judgments when judging hairstyles; however, participants’ postdicted accuracy of their judgments was not significantly related to the actual accuracy of their judgments when judging either the eyes or mouth. These findings suggest two potential routes for feature-based person perception: one that occurs from explicit and obvious cues (such as hairstyle) and one that occurs from intuitive and nonobvious cues (such as information coded in the eyes and mouth). Moreover, participants’ postdicted accuracy was also unrelated to their actual accuracy when judging targets’ full faces, which necessarily included all three of these features. This may be because competing information from the obvious and nonobvious cues undermined participants’ ability to infer their own accuracy. Indeed, Rule et al. (2008) reported that the correlation between actual and postdicted accuracy for judgments based on full faces was intermediate between that for the obvious (hairstyle) and nonobvious (eyes and mouth) features.

The finding of separate explicit versus intuitive processes for the extraction of person information demonstrates one benefit of studying perceptually ambiguous groups. Because of the obvious and redundant nature of features contributing to the perception of perceptually obvious groups such as race (e.g., Maddox, 2004) and gender (e.g., Brown & Perrett, 1993), the examination of parallel, simultaneous perceptual processes may be obfuscated by the high signal expressed from the perceptually obvious cues – particularly in cases where specific cues classically define group membership (e.g., the role of skin tone in the construction of racial boundaries). Thus, the subtlety of distinctive features among perceptually ambiguous groups, such as male sexual orientation, may allow for examinations of how it is that we arrive at accurate perceptions and categorizations of other individuals that might not otherwise be accessible from studying perceptual boundaries that are clear and obvious. That is, accuracy in the latter case is achieved so easily that the processes leading to these judgments are difficult to tease apart. Interrogating the processes that underlie the perception of perceptually ambiguous groups can therefore potentially allow for novel insights into the perceptual and cognitive processes that may be occurring for the categorization of all groups.

MOTIVATIONAL INFLUENCES IN PERCEPTION

Although perceptually ambiguous social categories have been under-examined, the utility of examining perceptual ambiguity has indeed long been recognized. Since the advent of the New Look movement in psychology, scholars have argued that ambiguity in the field invites motivational influences on visual perception. In their classic study Bruner and Goodman (1947) contended that increases in stimulus ambiguity heighten the opportunity for motivation or other contextual factors to influence perception. They emphasize that we live in a world of “ambiguously organized sensory stimulation” and thus what we see is actually a compromise between what is physically there and what has been selected based on contextual input, such as situational cues from the environment, or perceiver inputs, such as expectations or motivation.

Between 1947 and today, a plethora of studies have examined how environmental input, expectations, or motivation impact the cognitive processing of ambiguous stimuli (Alloy & Tabachnik, 1984; Atkinson & Walker, 1956; Balcetis & Dunning, 2006; Changizi & Hall, 2001; Duncan, 1976; Eberhardt, Dasgupta, & Banaszynski, 2003; Fazio, Ledbetter, & Towles-Schwen, 2000; Fazio, Powell, & Herr, 1983; Higgins & Tykocinski, 1992; Jenkin, 1957; Lambert, Solomon, & Watson, 1949; Lim & Pessoa, 2008; Muise, Brun, & Porelle, 1997; Postman & Crutchfield, 1952; Strachman & Gable, 2006; Trope, 1986; Voss, Rothermund, & Brandtstädter, 2008; Wyer, 1974). A number of these studies specifically examined the impact of motivation on visual perception. For example, Balcetis and Dunning (2006) observed that an ambiguous figure (the figure 13) was more often perceived as “B” or “13” depending on which of these interpretations was associated with a positive outcome for the perceiver. People see one dominant color in ambiguous bicolored stimuli when that color is associated with financial gain versus financial loss (Voss et al., 2008) and greater transparency (a property associated with water) in ambiguous objects when they are thirsty opposed to when they are not (Changizi & Hall, 2001). Specifically, in these more recent studies, great care was taken to ensure that participants were not merely reporting the desired outcome, but rather that visual perception was modified based on participants’ motivations to achieve a positive outcome, gain financially, or seek out water.

In addition to perceiver motivations, associations that linger in the environment can shape perception of ambiguous objects. In the United States, where Black people are frequently associated with crime, subliminal priming with Black faces facilitated the detection of crime-related objects in impoverished contexts (Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, & Davies, 2004). Thus participants were faster to identify a degraded image of a gun when primed with Black faces versus White faces. Similarly, Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, and Jackson (2008) demonstrated that individuals who hold an association between Black people and apes were faster to accurately detect the presence of apes in line drawings that transitioned from indeterminable dots to clear images, but only after subliminal exposure to Black faces. Thus, motivation and environmental associations can affect the perception of non-human objects, but can such information affect the perception of faces?

MOTIVATIONAL INFLUENCES IN FACE PERCEPTION

Given the importance of face perception in facilitating successful social interactions through perceiving cues of affiliation, group membership, emotion, and intention, we would expect that motivation and environmental associations should also shape face processing – tuning mechanisms to the most important interpretations for a particular perceiver or in a given environment. Indeed, the ecological theory of face perception (McArthur & Baron, 1983; Zebrowitz, 2006), emphasizes both the functional nature of face perception and the role that perceiver qualities and social context play in moderating processing. A central tenet of this theory revolves around how social affordances – opportunities to act or be acted upon conveyed through the face – depend on the perceivers’ attunements towards the stimulus information that reveal these affordances.

The con...

Table of contents

• Contents
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Foreword: A New Look at the “New Look”
• Introduction
• Section I Motivation and the Social Psychology of Visual Perception
• Section II Neuroscience and the Social Psychology of Visual Perception
• Section III Ecological Approach to the Social Psychology of Visual Perception
• Index