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A characteristic feature of daily life is encountering people in groups. Surprisingly, however, at least during the initial stages of processing, research has focused almost exclusively on the construal of single individuals. As such, it remains unclear whether person and people (i.e., group) perception yield comparable or divergent outcomes. Addressing this issue, here we explored a core social-cognitive topic—stereotype activation—by presenting both single and multiple facial primes in a sequential-priming task. In addition, the processes underlying task performance were probed using a drift diffusion model analysis. Based on prior work, it was hypothesised that multiple (vs. single) primes would increase stereotype-based responding. Across two experiments, a consistent pattern of results emerged. First, stereotype priming was insensitive to the number of primes that were presented and occurred only at a short prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (i.e., 250 ms). Second, priming was underpinned by a bias towards congruent (vs. incongruent) prime-target responses. Collectively these findings advance understanding of the emergence and origin of stereotype priming during person and people perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extensive literature has demonstrated stereotype-based priming effects. What this work has only recently considered, however, is the extent to which priming is moderated by the adoption of different sequential-priming tasks and the attendant implications for theoretical treatments of person perception. In addition, the processes through which priming arises (i.e., stimulus and/or response biases) remain largely unspecified. Accordingly, here we explored the emergence and origin of stereotype-based priming using both semantic- and response-priming tasks. Corroborating previous research, a stereotype-based priming effect only emerged when a response-priming (vs. semantic-priming) task was used. A further hierarchical drift diffusion model analysis revealed that this effect was underpinned by differences in the evidential requirements of response generation (i.e., a response bias), such that less evidence was needed when generating stereotype-consistent compared with stereotype-inconsistent responses. Crucially, information uptake (i.e., stimulus bias, efficiency of target processing) was faster for stereotype-inconsistent than stereotype-consistent targets. This reveals that stereotype-based priming originated in a response bias rather than the automatic activation of stereotypes. The theoretical implications of these findings are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stereotyping is a ubiquitous feature of social cognition, yet surprisingly little is known about how group-related beliefs influence the acquisition of person knowledge. Accordingly, in combination with computational modeling (i.e., Reinforcement Learning Drift Diffusion Model analysis), here we used a probabilistic selection task to explore the extent to which gender stereotypes impact instrumental learning. Several theoretically interesting effects were observed. First, reflecting the impact of cultural socialization on person construal, an expectancy-based preference for stereotype-consistent (vs. stereotype-inconsistent) responses was observed. Second, underscoring the potency of unexpected information, learning rates were faster for counter-stereotypic compared to stereotypic individuals, both for negative and positive prediction errors. Collectively, these findings are consistent with predictive accounts of social perception and have implications for the conditions under which stereotyping can potentially be reduced. • Stereotype-related beliefs influence instrumental learning. • Cultural socialization creates stereotype-related biases. • Prediction errors facilitate the learning of counterstereotypes (vs. stereotypes). • Computational approaches inform social-cognitive functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common assertion is that, based around prominent character traits, first impressions are spontaneously extracted from faces. Specifically, mere exposure to a person is sufficient to trigger the involuntary extraction of core personality characteristics (e.g., trustworthiness, dominance, competence), an outcome that supports a range of significant judgments (e.g., hiring, investing, electing). But is this in fact the case? Noting ambiguities in the extant literature, here we used a repetition priming procedure to probe the extent to which impressions of dominance are extracted from faces absent the instruction to evaluate the stimuli in this way. Across five experiments in which either the character trait of interest was made increasingly obvious to participants (Expts. 1–3) or attention was explicitly directed toward the faces to generate low-level/high-level judgments (Expts. 4 & 5), no evidence for the spontaneous extraction of first impressions was observed. Instead, priming only emerged when judgments of dominance were an explicit requirement of the task at hand. Thus, at least using a priming methodology, the current findings contest the notion that first impressions are a mandatory product of person perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]