Samuel A. W. Klein

One of psychology’s most ubiquitous findings is that of robust ingroup preference, an explicitly stated human preference for the groups to which we belong. The advent of implicit measures of social cognition introduced a paradoxical result: Compared to members of higher-status groups, members of lower-status groups often show no implicit ingroup preference, sometimes even showing outgroup preference, a result rarely observed on explicit measures. Prevailing theories have provided macro-level accounts, often in terms of system-justifying tendencies, but the various cognitive processes that could produce such an absence of ingroup preference among lower-status groups have not been directly decomposed. In this paper, we address this gap via formal process modeling applied to data from 5.7 million respondents collected across 16 years and 6 social categories. We find that, among lower-status groups, ingroup-affirming evaluations are accompanied by more pronounced self-regulatory control than outgroup-affirming evaluations, a regulatory asymmetry absent among higher-status groups. For example, evaluations affirming Black and overweight ingroups were accompanied by heightened self-regulatory control, whereas a comparable self-regulatory pattern was not observed for evaluations affirming White and non-overweight ingroups. The evidence points to a previously unrecognized role for self-regulatory control in the absence of ingroup preference, suggesting that the cognitive imprint of social hierarchies may extend beyond evaluative associations to the regulatory processes that govern their expression.

Forming impressions of others is a fundamental aspect of social life. These impressions necessitate the integration of many and varied sources of information about other people, including social group memberships, apparent personality traits, inferences from observed behaviors, and so forth. However, methodological limitations have hampered progress in understanding this integration process. In particular, extant approaches have been unable to measure the independent contributions of multiple features to a given impression. In this article, after describing these limitations and their constraints on theory testing and development, we present a multinomial processing tree model as a computational solution to the problem. Specifically, the model distinguishes the contributions of multiple cues to social judgment. We describe an empirical demonstration of how applying the model can resolve long-standing debates among person perception researchers. Finally, we survey a variety of questions to which this approach can be profitably applied.

Extending evidence for the rapid revision of mental representations of what other people are like, we explored whether people also rapidly revise their representations of what others look like. After learning to ascribe positive or negative behavioral information to a target person and generating a visualization of their face in a reverse-correlation task, participants learned new information that was (a) counter-attitudinal and diagnostic about the person's character or (b) neutral and non-diagnostic, and then they generated a second visualization. Ratings of these visualizations in separate samples of participants consistently revealed revision effects: Time 2 visualizations assimilated to the counter-attitudinal information. Weaker revision effects also emerged after learning neutral information, suggesting that the evaluative extremity of visualizations may dilute when encountering any additional information. These findings indicate that representations of others' appearance may change upon learning more about them, particularly when this new information is counter-attitudinal and diagnostic.