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 |
Keywords
- encoding
- evolutionary psychology
- memory
- threat
- visual attention
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Psychology
- Clinical Psychology