Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Theses
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ItemSeeing other people: what sensory perception teaches us about social perception( 2016)Stereotyping is a widespread phenomenon with occasionally destructive consequences. It is sometimes framed as a special case of categorisation (Allport, 1954), but since categorisation underlies all perception and decision-making (Ashby & Lee, 1993), this is suggestive of an analogy between social perception and basic, sensory perception. The aim of this thesis is to explore how far this analogy can be usefully extended. Each of the experiments presented uses computer-generated human faces as stimuli, generally requiring participants to make personality inferences about them. This is based on prior research that shows the personality judgments people make can be well described with two dimensions, warmth and competence (Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2008), which are readily perceived in images of human faces (Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008). The empirical content of this thesis is presented in three thematically distinct chapters, followed by a general, concluding section. Multidimensional Scaling with Personality Perception Multidimensional scaling can use participants’ similarity judgments to model psychological space (Borg & Groenen, 2005). Since similarity is the yardstick of psychological space (Shephard, 1987) and stereotype-relevant constructs such as perceived homogeneity and atypicality can be expressed in terms of similarity, this makes MDS seem like a potentially promising way to characterise social perception. The three experiments in this chapter demonstrated that multidimensional scaling fits of judgments of the similarity of the inferred personalities of human faces reproduce several phenomena in the realm of social perception and also made novel findings. This method is thus validated for the study of social perception . Social Knowledge Partitioning in Function Learning According to Sewell and Lewandowsky (2011), ‘When knowledge partitioning occurs, people simplify a complex task by decomposing it into separate local solutions’ (p. 86). Knowledge partitioning demonstrates that purely exemplar-based models are insufficient for describing human cognition. The five experiments presented in this chapter showed that people sometimes partition socially meaningful knowledge, learning distinct rules for African and Caucasian faces when ethnicity does not predict correct responses. Attitude questionnaire scores revealed differences between those who partitioned and those who did not, albeit in an unexpected direction. Attempting to Replicate Ishii and Kitayama (2011) In this chapter, an attempt is made (unsuccessfully) to replicate Ishii and Kitayama’s (2001) ‘perceptual out-group homogeneity effect’ study. Whereas the previous two chapters of this thesis provided positive examples of how far the analogy between social and sensory perception can be usefully extended, this chapter provided a negative example. It is argued that while Ishii and Kitayama’s (2011) reasoning was appealing, the experiment presented in this chapter, which was designed to give the ‘perceptual out-group homogeneity effect’ the greatest possible chance to emerge, failed because their result was a false positive.