Rapid visual perception of interracial crowds: Racial category learning from emotional segregation.

Abstract

Drawing from research on social identity and ensemble coding, we theorize that crowd perception provides a powerful mechanism for social category learning. Crowds include allegiances that may be distinguished by visual cues to shared behavior and mental states, providing perceivers with direct information about social groups and thus a basis for learning social categories. Here, emotion expressions signaled group membership: to the extent that a crowd exhibited emotional segregation (i.e., was segregated into emotional subgroups), a visible characteristic (race) that incidentally distinguished emotional subgroups was expected to support categorical distinctions. Participants were randomly assigned to view interracial crowds in which emotion differences between (black vs. white) subgroups were either small (control condition) or large (emotional segregation condition). On each trial, participants saw crowds of 12 faces (6 black, 6 white) for roughly 300 ms and were asked to estimate the average emotion of the entire crowd. After all trials, participants completed a racial categorization task and self-report measure of race essentialism. As predicted, participants exposed to emotional segregation (vs. control) exhibited stronger racial category boundaries and stronger race essentialism. Furthermore, such effects accrued via ensemble coding, a visual mechanism that summarizes perceptual information: emotional segregation strengthened participants' racial category boundaries to the extent that segregation limited participants' abilities to integrate emotion across racial subgroups. Together with evidence that people observe emotional segregation in natural environments, these findings suggest that crowd perception mechanisms support racial category boundaries and race essentialism. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Crowd-Emotion-Amplification Effect

“…In conclusion, this project extends recent attempts to examine the role of ensemble coding in processes that are important to social functioning (Goldenberg et al, 2020; Lamer et al, 2018; Phillips et al, 2018). Learning more about how people rapidly evaluate complex social information not only may explain important aspects of social behavior but also may open the door to future interventions.…”

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.…”

“…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. Further, seeing emotionally segregated interracial crowds for merely 1/3 second leads to fewer biracial judgments and more racial essentialism (Lamer 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. Further, seeing emotionally segregated interracial crowds for merely 1/3 second leads to fewer biracial judgments and more racial essentialism (Lamer et al, 2018). Together, these studies demonstrate that people can extract gender and race ratios in an array of faces, with downstream influences on attitudes and judgments.…”

“…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).…”