Measuring Multiple Sources of Information to Test Theoretical Pillars of Person Perception

Given how impactful and ubiquitous our judgments of others are to our social lives, psychologists have long been interested in how perceivers integrate the many varied attributes that characterize a person. Among the many claims relied upon by theories of person perception, one core claim has been that the processing of certain attributes (e.g., individuating behaviors) are affected by cognitive capacity more than the processing of other attributes (e.g., social categories). However, current measures of person perception have not afforded appropriate tests of these claims. The current project uses multinomial process tree (MPT) modeling to avoid previous limitations in measuring person perception. MPTs afford independent measurement of each available cue to judgment. In so doing, the current experiment will manipulate participants’ cognitive capacity while they form judgments of others. If some social information (e.g., social categories like gender, race, and age) are less malleable to variations in cognitive capacity, then their use should not change as a function of cognitive load manipulations, whereas the use of other information (e.g., emotion) might.