Nicholas Alt

California State University, Long Beach | CSULB · Department of Psychology

The confrontation of prejudicial acts and comments promotes multiple benefits, most notably the prevention of future prejudicial remarks and the reduction of stereotype use. Research, however, consistently shows low rates of confronting prejudice, particularly regarding sexism. Here, we examine whether personal sense of power, known to increase act...

We examined development of 5- and 10.5-month-old infants’ face representations, focusing on infants’ discrimination and categorization of female and male faces. We tested for gender-based preferences and categorization of female and male faces by presenting infants with pairs of faces and then habituating them to a series of majority female or male...

We examined whether, even at zero acquaintance, observers accurately infer others’ social network positions—specifically, the number and patterning of social ties (e.g., brokerage—the extent to which a person bridges disconnected people) and the trait impressions that support this accuracy. We paired social network data ( n = 272 professional schoo...

Past research on prejudice confrontations as a prejudice reduction tool has only examined bias that was implicated in the confrontation, such as the use of negative Black stereotypes after being confronted for using negative Black stereotypes. Examining the breadth of prejudice confrontations, we hypothesize that confronted individuals should subse...

For 70 years, the field of social perception has concluded that perceivers can determine others' social category memberships with remarkable accuracy. However, it has become increasingly clear that accuracy is only part of the story, as social category judgments are often systematically biased toward one category over another. For example, when cat...

We conducted a survey about the 2014 FIFA World Cup that measured attitudes about FIFA, players, and officials in 18 languages with 4600 respondents from 29 countries. Sixty percent of respondents perceived FIFA officials as being dishonest, and people from countries with less institutional corruption and stronger rule of law perceived FIFA officia...

Body weight is a critical dimension by which we evaluate others, with heavier individuals facing higher levels of stigma and discrimination compared to thinner individuals. Yet, the perception of body weight can be ambiguous, suggesting that stereotypic associations and heuristics influence which bodies are deemed as "typical" for a particular grou...

Human observers extract perceptual summaries for sets of items after brief visual exposure, accurately judging the average size of geometric shapes (Ariely, 2001), walking direction of a crowd (Sweeny, Haroz, & Whitney, 2013), and the eye gaze of groups of faces (Sweeny & Whitney, 2014). In addition to such actuarial summaries, we hypothesize that...

Past research on confronting racial prejudice has largely examined negative racial stereotypes. In the present work, we investigate perceiver and target perspectives associated with the evaluative costs of confronting positive racial stereotypes. We demonstrate that, in general, Asian Americans and African Americans who confront positive racial ste...

The present research investigates how intergroup apologies, defined as apologies between two groups, affect perceived remorse and outgroup attitudes (e.g., explicit and implicit), in the context of power asymmetries. We recruited participants from two countries that differ in perceived power: South Korea and the United States. Participants read a v...

Everyday, we visually perceive people not only in isolation but also in groups. Yet, visual person perception research typically focuses on inferences made about isolated individuals. By integrating social vision and visual ensemble coding, we present novel evidence that (a) perceivers rapidly (500 ms) extract a group’s ratio of men to women and (b...

According to gendered race theory, racial stereotypes can contain a gendered component whereby certain racial and ethnic groups are viewed as being more prototypically masculine or feminine. A number of studies investigating gendered race stereotypes have found that Blacks in North American society are represented and conceived as prototypically ma...

Previous research from the perspective of gendered race theory has demonstrated that stereotypes about race often contain a gendered component, whereby certain racial and ethnic groups are stereotyped as more masculine or feminine. In particular, in North American contexts, Blacks tend to be associated with masculinity, while Asians tend to be asso...