The Role of Group Membership and Individuating Information in Person Perception

ABSTRACT Prominent social cognition models suggest that perceivers are cognitive misers, defaulting to schematic, group-based judgments over individuating judgments of others. This is attributed to the more spontaneous and effortless activation of group- versus individual-specific information, such that judgments of individual group members are expected to rely more on group information, particularly when judgment is automatic (unintentional, uncontrolled, and/or effortless) rather than non-automatic (intentional, controlled, and/or effortful). In several lines of work, I put this premise to test, comparing evidence from long-existing social groups with evidence from novel, lab-created groups that allow key confounds to be removed. While studies with long-existing groups show a sharp dissociation between automatic and non-automatic judgments in their reliance on group versus individuating information, studies that de-confound these factors show a clear dominance of individuating information, even in automatic judgment. Taken together, my research suggests that people are not necessarily cognitive misers: by default, both non-automatic and automatic judgments are sensitive to the diagnosticity of available information, and observed dissociations likely reflect factors other than mere dominance of group information.