Abstract
When encountering individuals with a potential inclination to harm them, people face a dilemma: Staring at them provides useful information about their intentions but may also be perceived by them as intrusive and challenging-thereby increasing the likelihood of the very threat the people fear. One solution to this dilemma would be an enhanced ability to efficiently encode such individuals-to be able to remember them without spending any additional direct attention on them. In two experiments, the authors primed self-protective concerns in perceivers and assessed visual attention and recognition memory for a variety of faces. Consistent with hypotheses, self-protective participants (relative to control participants) exhibited enhanced encoding efficiency (i.e., greater memory not predicated on any enhancement of visual attention) for Black and Arab male faces- groups stereotyped as being potentially dangerous-but not for female or White male faces. Results suggest that encoding efficiency depends on the functional relevance of the social information people encounter.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 182-189 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Social Psychological and Personality Science |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2010 |
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH64734 to Douglas Kenrick, Steven Neuberg, and Mark Schaller, U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences Grant W74V8H-05-K-0003 to Douglas T. Kenrick and Steven Neuberg, and National Science Foundation Grant BCS-0642873 to Vaughn Becker, Douglas Kenrick, and Steven Neuberg.
Keywords
- encoding
- evolutionary psychology
- memory
- threat
- visual attention
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Psychology
- Clinical Psychology