Citation

Becker DV, Anderson US, Neuberg SL, Maner JK, Shapiro JR, Ackerman JM, Schaller M, Kenrick DT. Soc. Psychol. Pers. Sci. 2010; 1(2): 182-189.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1948550609359202

PMID

unavailable

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.