Séminaire – Kyle RATNER

Visualizing “Us” and “Them”
Most social psychology research on face processing focuses on direct visual perception. However, people regularly form mental representations of faces when the people they are thinking about are not in front of them. Research from my lab suggests that merely sharing a novel group membership with another person can bias how one represents that person’s face. In the current talk, I will present new evidence that one way people represent ingroup and outgroup faces is by imbuing arbitrary group distinctions with meaning. Specifically, we find that people who are separated into minimal groups using a classic overestimator/underestimator paradigm form different representations of overestimator and underestimator faces. Ingroup and outgroup representational differences are then scaffolded onto the overestimator and underestimator differences. This work provides new insight into the minimal group paradigm and how people think about faces of group members. It also adds to a growing literature on how social factors influence mental representations of faces.

Kyle RATNER de l’Université de Californie à Santa Barbara