Becker D Vaughn, Anderson Uriah S, Neuberg Steven L, Maner Jon K, Shapiro Jenessa R, Ackerman Joshua M, Schaller Mark, Kenrick Douglas T
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.
Soc Psychol Personal Sci. 2010 Apr;1(2):182-189. doi: 10.1177/1948550609359202.
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.
当遇到可能有伤害他人倾向的人时，人们会面临一个两难困境：盯着他们能获取有关其意图的有用信息，但也可能被他们视为侵犯和挑衅行为——从而增加人们所恐惧的那种威胁发生的可能性。解决这一两难困境的一个办法是增强对这类人的有效编码能力——能够记住他们，而无需在他们身上额外花费任何直接注意力。在两项实验中，作者启动了感知者的自我保护意识，并评估了对各种面孔的视觉注意力和识别记忆。与假设一致，自我保护意识较强的参与者（相对于对照组参与者）对被刻板印象为具有潜在危险性的黑人男性和阿拉伯男性面孔展现出更高的编码效率（即，更强的记忆能力，且不依赖于视觉注意力的任何增强），但对女性或白人男性面孔则不然。结果表明，编码效率取决于人们所遇到的社会信息的功能相关性。
