Complex Social Categorization

Most research on social categorization and stereotyping focuses on perceptions of people on a single social categorical space (e.g., gender, race, age). However, perceivers categorize targets into multiple social groups from visual information (e.g., faces) and other cues. Furthermore, perceivers show less consensus and take longer to categorize social groups seen as more categorically ambiguous (e.g., Multiracials in the United States). We examine how people make sense of multiply-categorizable and categorically ambiguous others.