Sarah Ariel Lamer

University of Tennessee | UTK · Department of Psychology

One tacit assumption in social psychology is that people learn gender stereotypes from their environments. Yet, little research has examined how such learning might occur: What are the features of social environments that shape people's gender stereotypes? We propose that nonverbal patterns communicate intersubjective gender norms (i.e., what behav...

Racial inequality persists in modern American society and permeates domains ranging from healthcare to education. Scientists typically trace such racial inequality to implicit (rather than explicit) racial bias, and some argue that implicit racial bias is better understood as a contextual or cultural variable rather than as an individual difference...

People are good at categorizing the emotions of individuals and crowds of faces. People also make mistakes when classifying emotion. When they do so with judgments of individuals, these errors tend to be negatively biased, potentially serving a protective function. For example, a face with a subtle expression is more likely to be categorized as ang...

Where an object or person is located in space can communicate important attributes, such as power, agency, or status. We theorized that people may use location to convey messages about social groups. In four studies, we examined whether women and men express ingroup bias or stereotypical bias in their placement of and memory for gendered objects. I...

People draw from physical properties like spatial location to better understand complex concepts like power (Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010; T. W. Schubert, 2005). We examined the cultural implications of such associations for gender stereotypes. Specifically, we hypothesized that people would make location-based attributions of power and dominance...

Written language is comprised of simple line configurations (i.e., letters) that, in theory, elicit affect by virtue of the concepts they symbolize, rather than their physical features. However, we propose that the line configurations that comprise letters vary in their visual resemblance to canonical features of facial emotion and, through such em...

Drawing from research on social identity and ensemble coding, we theorize that crowd perception provides a powerful mechanism for social category learning. Crowds include allegiances that may be distinguished by visual cues to shared behavior and mental states, providing perceivers with direct information about social groups and thus a basis for le...

The scientific identification of how social environments transmit intergroup biases is a transparently complex endeavor. Existing research has examined the emergence of intergroup biases such as racial prejudice and stereotypes in many ways, including correlations between racial diversity and children's prejudice, content analyses of features in th...

Observing shifts in others’ eye gaze causes perceivers to shift their own attention in the same direction, and such gaze following has been regarded as reflexive. We hypothesized that effects of social hierarchy on reflexive gaze following are driven largely by power asymmetries. We used a standard gaze-cuing paradigm with 100 and 300 ms stimulus o...

Causal influences of culture on cognition are challenging to examine scientifically. We here introduce a method to address this challenge. Cultural snapshots enable scientists to (a) characterize the cultural information commonly and frequently encountered by a collective, (b) examine how such cultural information influences the cognitions of indiv...

Spatial localization is a basic process in vision, occurring reliably when people encounter an object or person. Yet the role of spatial-location in the visual perception of people is poorly understood. We explored the extent to which spatial-location distorts the perception of gender. Consistent with evidence that the perception of objects is cons...

Gender is a term, borrowed from grammar, to describe individuals' social identity (woman/girl, man/boy) and personality or behavioral tendencies (e.g., masculine, feminine, androgynous, transgender). Gender as a social identity is usually (but not necessarily) related to an individual's biological sex. Feminists and most behavioral science research...

Self-esteem fluctuates in response to verbal feedback and social exclusion, but such unambiguous feedback may not occur frequently enough to account for moment-to-moment self-esteem fluctuations. We propose that others' facial behavior provides a frequently-encountered source of feedback to which self-esteem should respond. We expected repeated exp...

Memory for behavior is functionally important, yet memory for many details of behavior decays quickly. The authors argue that the eye gaze, unlike some other details, is critical to understanding behavior and thus people should remember eye-gaze direction. The authors thus present the first data on eye-gaze memory. They also expected a self-enhance...