ABSTRACT
People routinely make judgments based on social categories (i.e., categoriesthat place an individual within a larger social group such as sex, race, sexualorientation, religion, occupation), and are quite adept at extracting others’ social category memberships (Bruce & Young, 1998; Cloutier, Mason, & Macrae, 2005; Macrae, Quinn, Mason, & Quadflieg, 2005). However, not all social categories are easily discernible. Some social categories are concealed, whereas other visually identifiable social categories may be obscured by conflicting cues or contexts. Whether making a judgment based on a concealed identity (e.g., sexual orientation) or a social identity with a mixture of cues (e.g., multiracial), both judgments involve construing a category based on ambiguous perceptual cues. Do the perceptual and cognitive processes underlying social categorization function for ambiguous social targets just as they do for perceptually obvious targets? We propose that although perceivers are surprisingly accurate at construing the identity of these ambiguous targets despite their “degraded” informational input, such construals are often constrained by additional cues, such as the context of the surrounding environment or the perceiver’s motivation. In particular, perception of facial cues that mark these social categories may be particularly susceptible to top-down influences as identity cues become increasingly ambiguous.
