How We Perceive Others: Interpersonal Perception

Understanding Interpersonal Stereotypes around Social Identities

This program examines how people infer traits and belonging from social category information, and whether stereotypes are structured and activated.

Current Projects

  1. Race and gender
  2. Ethnoracial ambiguity
  3. Socioeconomic status
  4. Political affiliation and religiosity

Project 1 — Race and Gender in Impression Formation

This project examines how race and gender stereotypes unfold in naturalistic contexts. Using Zoom-like video conversations, we tested whether perceivers formed “clustered” impressions of intersectional identities (e.g., Black women, Asian men) across personality traits and stereotype content domains. We then examined which traits drove these impressions and how they shape downstream judgments like sympathy, affiliation, and credibility, revealing how bias operates at the level of individuals, not just group labels. Manuscript under review (Jacobson, Hughes, & Chavez).

Key idea: Trait impressions are biased by intersectional identities that are additive or distinctly hybrid; and they are interpersonally consequential.

RSA visualization of intersectional stereotypes
Figure 1. Heatmaps of dissimilarity matrices used in the representational similarity analysis from all the target pairs for a representative participant. Trait dissimilarity was calculated using the Euclidean distance of the trait ratings for each target and was used as the outcome variable in the modeling. Race and gender dissimilarity matrices were calculated using Euclidean distance of the dummy coded category membership and were used as predictor variables in the modeling.
Ambiguity pipeline figure
Figure 2. Fixed effects of target race, target gender, and their interaction on perceived Big Five traits and stereotype content domains. Coefficients represent differences in perceiver ratings as a function of targets' categorical identities (race, gender), controlling for targets' self-reported standing on the corresponding attribute. Models included random intercepts for perceivers and targets; interaction terms (e.g., Black × woman) indicate whether the combined effect of race and gender differs from the sum of their main effects.

Project 2 — Ethnoracial Ambiguity

When people form first impressions, they often rely on category-based expectations, but racially ambiguous individuals challenge these shortcuts by defying easy classification. This project examines how perceivers form trait impressions of racially ambiguous targets (including multiracial, Latine, and South/Southeast Asian individuals) in naturalistic, video-based interactions. We also examine whether individual differences across perceivers, such as racial essentialist beliefs, interracial exposure, and childhood neighborhood diversity, predict the extent to which impressions rely on racial schemas versus individualized cues.

Key idea: How people perceive racially ambiguous individuals may depend on whether they rely on racial schemas or individuated cues, and this likely varies by perceivers’ beliefs and lived experience.

Project 3 — Socioeconomic Status

This project examines how socioeconomic status shapes first impressions and credibility judgments during real-world social interactions. In a computer-mediated round-robin study, U.S. adults engaged in brief dyadic conversations and then rated their partners’ SES, personality traits, and credibility. This approach reveals how SES detection and SES-based stereotyping operate in everyday interaction, and how these processes may perpetuate inequality. Published in Journal of Personality & Social Psychology (Hughes, Jacobson, Rule, & Srivastava, 2025).

Key idea: SES shapes trait impressions in social interactions.

SEM path diagram for SES and credibility
Figure 3. SEM path diagram illustrating the Interpersonal Stereotype Model linking perceived SES to affiliation interest through SES-based trait inferences. Paths represent standardized regression coefficients; the indirect effect captures SES-based differences in affiliation interest operating through trait impressions.

Project 4 — Political Affiliation & Religiosity

This project examines how political ideology and religiosity shape impression formation as interpersonal stereotypes in everyday interactions, guiding how people are perceived and who others want to affiliate with, even when these identities are not explicitly stated. The study draws on two undergraduate samples and one U.S. adult sample (Ns = 224, 151, 297). Manuscript under review (Hughes, Jacobson, Pearman, Hamid, Rule, & Srivastava).

Key idea: Political ideology, and less strongly, religiosity, shapes everyday social interaction, guiding first impressions and who people choose to connect with, even when politics is never discussed.