Prior work suggests that when social targets with ambiguous group membership present an overt threat, people are more likely to categorize the target as belonging to the outgroup. Yet, the impact of threat cues incidental to the target on social categorization remains unexplored. Prior work has found overt threat cues integral to the stimulus bias outgroup social categorization irrespective of the group in question. In contrast, we predicted that incidental threat cues would only bias judgments when the potential outgroup was one linked with threat. Drawing upon research finding the color red serves as an incidental threat cue, six experiments find that a red background behind a face (vs. a control color) increases outgroup categorizations, but only when the outgroup is linked with threat. Incidental threat cues bias outgroup categorization in a different manner than do overt threats integral to the stimulus, suggesting refinements to current thinking on the role of motivated processes in social categorization.

中文翻译：

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威胁和种族分类的偶然线索

先前的工作表明，当具有模糊的群体成员身份的社会目标提出明显的威胁时，人们更有可能将目标归为外来群体。但是，尚未探究目标附带的威胁提示对社会分类的影响。先前的工作已经发现，无论相关群体如何，明显的威胁提示都是刺激偏见群体社会分类中不可或缺的。相反，我们预测，当潜在的外部威胁是与威胁相关的因素之一时，偶然的威胁提示只会使判断产生偏差。根据研究发现红色是偶然威胁提示的研究，六个实验发现，脸部后面的红色背景（相对于对照颜色）增加了外来群体的分类，但是只有当外来群体与威胁联系在一起时。