Assessment in Blink of an Eye: People Perceive Sex Ratio & Threat of Group in Less Than a Second

Both social psychology and vision science research has shown merely glimpsing a face, human perceivers rapidly and efficiently decipher others’ social category memberships (e.g., race, sex), emotional states (e.g., happiness, fear), and interpersonal traits. In the real world, people encounter groups, not just individuals. Would perceptions made at the individual level translate to groups? That’s what Alt and his colleagues wanted to understand.

They combined insights from social psychology and vision science to test novel questions regarding whether people can accurately report a group’s sex ratio and in turn, whether evaluative judgments of threat are connected to who is in the group.

Alt and colleagues ran a series of three studies to understand how quickly people detected differences in groups, and measure their accuracy. Overall, participants rapidly (in 500 milliseconds) extract a group’s ratio of men to women and judged groups as more threatening as the ratio of men to women increased. The authors found the judgments were evident in both explicit and indirect evaluations.

Now that they’ve shown people rapidly and accurately extract social category information from groups of faces, Alt and colleagues want to see if there are ways to manipulate one’s perception of groups, and how that affects group cohesion. They are also testing whether visual cues to masculinity and femininity are perceived at rapid speed and their effect on social evaluative judgments.

Citation:Threat in the Company of Men Ensemble Perception and Threat Evaluations of Groups Varying in Sex Ratio http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1948550617731498