This program of research investigates the cognitive processes involved in social perception, focusing on how memory and attention influence social categorization and stereotyping processes. The research is grounded in the Smith-Zarate exemplar model of perception which holds that social judgments are based on a target's similarity to past specific memory traces of persons rather than on the target's similarity to abstract prototypes or group stereotypes. Eight studies will test this model within an inter-ethnic context on an international border, investigating how past experiences with individuals from various social groups influence the application of social stereotypes. Questions addressed include how minorities are perceived, how the passage of time influences specific memory traces about people, how people learn about new groups, and how a perceiver's own gender and ethnicity influence social perception processes. The consequences of targets' multiple category membership (e.g., ethnicity and gender) on social judgments are examined in this work which, by using photographs rather than linguistic labels, provides more ecological validity than much of the existing research on stereotyping. Another significant strength of the project is the use of an ethnically diverse subject population, which will provide meaningrful answers to the question of how target and perceiver attributes influence intergroup categorization processes. Finally, the project will advance the theoretical development of exemplar theories of memory and categorization, incorporating modeels of steroetyping into other domains of decision making. This research addresses how and why humans categorize others into groups, the mediating processes predicting categorization, and the consequences of categorizations for stereotype formation and change. The fact that any individual can be categorized in multiple ways (e.g., by gender, ethnicity, occupation) is explored in investigations of how categorization of people is influen ced by the social context in which they appear as well as by the perceiver's own attributes. Thus, for example, one study will test the hypothesis that people will be categorized according to whichever of their attributes is most salient (e.g., most unique) in the social context in which they appear, and that such contextually induced categorization can produce later stereotyping even by judges who were not intially so disposed. This research employs a population of Hispanic students that is underrepresented in basic research on stereotyping and it has the unique advantage of advancing theoretically relevant steroetyping research in an envrionment where a disadvantaged minority (Hispanics) are the local majority. The subject population make these studies ideally suited to providing meaningrful answers to the theoretically important question of how target and perceiver attributes influence intergroup categorization processes. This work is highly relevant to the goals of the NSF Human Capital research agenda in the domain of 'disadvantage in a diverse society', since it will contribute to the understanding of basic cognitive processes that foster stereotyping and discrimination as well as how these effects can be exacerbated or ameliorated by different social contexts.
