Steven L. Neuberg

A Continuum of Impression Formation, from Category-Based to Individuating Processes: Influences of Information and Motivation on Attention and Interpretation

Publisher Summary This chapter presents an integrated understanding of various impression formation processes. The chapter introduces a model of impression formation that integrates social cognition research on stereotyping with traditional research on person perception. According to this model, people form impressions of others through a variety of processes that lie on a continuum reflecting the extent to that the perceiver utilizes a targets particular attributes. The continuum implies that the distinctions among these processes are matters of degree, rather than discrete shifts. The chapter examines the evidence for the five main premises of the model, it is helpful to discuss some related models that raise issues for additional consideration. The chapter discusses the research that supports each of the five basic premises, competing models, and hypotheses for further research. The chapter concludes that one of the models fundamental purposes is to integrate diverse perspectives on impression formation, as indicated by the opening quotation. It is also designed to generate predictions about basic impression formation processes and to help generate interventions that can reduce the impact of stereotypes on impression formation.

Motivational Influences on Impression Formation: Outcome Dependency, Accuracy-Driven Attention, and Individuating Processes

How might being outcome dependent on another person influence the processes that one uses to form impressions of that person? We designed three experiments to investigate this question with respect to short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency. In all three experiments, subjects expected to interact with a young man formerly hospitalized as a schizophrenic, and they received information about the persons attributes in either written profiles or videotapes. In Experiment 1, short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency led subjects to use relatively individuating processes (i.e., to base their impressions of the patient on his particular attributes), even under conditions that typically lead subjects to use relatively category-based processes (i.e., to base their impressions on the patients schizophrenic label). Moreover, in the conditions that elicited individuating processes, subjects spent more time attending to the patients particular attribute information. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the attention effects in Experiment 1 were not merely a function of impression positivity and that outcome dependency did not influence the impression formation process when attribute information in addition to category-level information was unavailable. Finally, Experiment 3 manipulated not outcome dependency but the attentional goal of forming an accurate impression. We found that accuracy-driven attention to attribute information also led to individuating processes. The results of the three experiments indicate that there are important influences of outcome dependency on impression formation. These results are consistent with a model in which the tendency for short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency to facilitate individuating impression formation processes is mediated by an increase in accuracy-driven attention to attribute information.

Renovating the Pyramid of Needs: Contemporary Extensions Built Upon Ancient Foundations

Maslow’s pyramid of human needs, proposed in 1943, has been one of the most cognitively contagious ideas in the behavioral sciences. Anticipating later evolutionary views of human motivation and cognition, Maslow viewed human motives as based in innate and universal predispositions. We revisit the idea of a motivational hierarchy in light of theoretical developments at the interface of evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology. After considering motives at three different levels of analysis, we argue that the basic foundational structure of the pyramid is worth preserving, but that it should be buttressed with a few architectural extensions. By adding a contemporary design feature, connections between fundamental motives and immediate situational threats and opportunities should be highlighted. By incorporating a classical element, these connections can be strengthened by anchoring the hierarchy of human motives more firmly in the bedrock of modern evolutionary theory. We propose a renovated hierarchy of fundamental motives that serves as both an integrative framework and a generative foundation for future empirical research.

What the Need for Closure Scale Measures and What It Does Not: Toward Differentiating Among Related Epistemic Motives

The Need for Closure Scale (NFCS; D. M. Webster & A. W. Kruglanski, 1994) was introduced to assess the extent to which a person, faced with a decision o r judgment, desires any answer, as compared with confusion and ambiguity. The NFCS was presented as being unidimensional and as having adequate discriminant validity. Our data contradict these conceptual and psychometric claims. As a unidimensional scale, the NFCS is redundant with the Personal Need for Structure Scale (PNS; M. M. Thompson, M. E. Naccarato, & K. E. Parker, 1989). When the NFCS is used more appropriately as a multidimensional instrument, 3 of its facets are redundant with the PNS Scale, and a 4th is redundant with the Personal Fear of Invalidity Scale (M. M. Thompson et al., 1989). It is suggested that the NFCS masks important distinctions between 2 independent epistemic motives: the preference for quick, decisive answers (nonspecific closure) and the need to create and maintain simple structures (one form o f specific closure).

The Confounded Nature of Angry Men and Happy Women

Findings of 7 studies suggested that decisions about the sex of a face and the emotional expressions of anger or happiness are not independent: Participants were faster and more accurate at detecting angry expressions on male faces and at detecting happy expressions on female faces. These findings were robust across different stimulus sets and judgment tasks and indicated bottom-up perceptual processes rather than just top-down conceptually driven ones. Results from additional studies in which neutrally expressive faces were used suggested that the connections between masculine features and angry expressions and between feminine features and happy expressions might be a property of the sexual dimorphism of the face itself and not merely a result of gender stereotypes biasing the perception.

From Stereotype Threat to Stereotype Threats: Implications of a Multi-Threat Framework for Causes, Moderators, Mediators, Consequences, and Interventions:

More than 100 articles have examined the construct of stereotype threat and its implications. However, stereotype threat seems to mean different things to different researchers and has been employed to describe and explain processes and phenomena that appear to be fundamentally distinct. Complementing existing models, the authors posit a Multi-Threat Framework in which six qualitatively distinct stereotype threats arise from the intersection of two dimensions—the target of the threat (the self/ones group) and the source of the threat (the self/outgroup others/ingroup others). The authors propose that these threats constitute the core of the broader stereotype threat construct and provide the foundation for understanding additional, as of yet uncharacterized, stereotype threats. The proposed threats likely differentially peril those with different stigmatizable characteristics, have different eliciting conditions and moderators, are mediated by somewhat different processes, are coped with and compensated for in different ways, and require different interventions to overcome.

Human Threat Management Systems: Self-Protection and Disease Avoidance

Humans likely evolved precautionary systems designed to minimize the threats to reproductive fitness posed by highly interdependent ultrasociality. A review of research on the self-protection and disease avoidance systems reveals that each system is functionally distinct and domain-specific: each is attuned to different cues; engages different emotions, inferences, and behavioral inclinations; and is rooted in somewhat different neurobiological substrates. These systems share important features, however. Each system is functionally coherent, in that perceptual, affective, cognitive, and behavioral processes work in concert to reduce fitness costs of potential threats. Each system is biased in a risk-averse manner, erring toward precautionary responses even when available cues only heuristically imply threat. And each system is functionally flexible, being highly sensitive to specific ecological and dispositional cues that signal greater vulnerability to the relevant threat. These features characterize a general template useful for understanding not only the self-protection and disease avoidance systems, but also a broader set of evolved, domain-specific precautionary systems.

The Effects of Perspective Taking on Motivations for Helping: Still No Evidence for Altruism

To investigate the existence of true altruism, the authors assessed the link between empathic concern and helping by (a) employing an experimental perspective-taking paradigm used previously to demonstrate empathy-associated helping and (b) assessing the empathy-helping relationship while controlling for a range of relevant, well-measured nonaltruistic motivations. Consistent with previous research, the authors found a significant zero-order relationship between helping and empathic concern, the purported motivator of true altruism. This empathy-helping relationship disappeared, however, when nonaltruistic motivators (oneness and negative affect) were taken into account: Only the nonaltruistic factors of oneness (merged identity with the victim) and negative affect mediated helping, whereas empathic concern did not. Evidence for true altruism remains elusive.

Infection Breeds Reticence The Effects of Disease Salience on Self-Perceptions of Personality and Behavioral Avoidance Tendencies

Social living brings humans great rewards, but also associated dangers, such as increased risk of infection from others. Although the body’s immune system is integral to combating disease, it is physiologically costly. Less costly are evolved mechanisms for promoting avoidance of people who are potentially infectious, such as perceiving oneself as less social and increasing the tendency to make avoidant movements. In Experiment 1, exposure to a disease prime led participants to rate themselves as less extraverted than did exposure to a control prime, and led participants high in perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD) to rate themselves as less agreeable and less open to experience than did exposure to a control prime. In Experiment 2, a disease prime facilitated avoidant tendencies in arm movements when participants viewed photographs of faces, especially for participants high in PVD. Together, these findings reveal functional changes in perception and behavior that would serve to promote avoidance of potentially infectious individuals.

Goal-Driven Cognition and Functional Behavior The Fundamental-Motives Framework

Fundamental motives have direct implications for evolutionary fitness and orchestrate attention, memory, and social inference in functionally specific ways. Motivational states linked to self-protection and mating offer illustrative examples. When self-protective motives are aroused, people show enhanced attention to, and memory for, angry male strangers; they also perceive out-group members as especially dangerous. In contrast, when mating motives are aroused, men show enhanced attention to and memory for attractive members of the opposite sex; mating motives also lead men (but not women) to perceive sexual arousal in attractive members of the opposite sex. There are further functionally specific consequences for social behavior. For example, self-protective motives increase conformity among both men and women, whereas mating motives lead men (but not women) to engage in anticonformist behavior. Other motivational systems trigger different adaptive patterns of cognitive and behavioral responses. This body of research illustrates the highly specific consequences of fitness-relevant motivational states for cognition and behavior, and highlights the value of studying human motivation and cognition within an evolutionary framework.