A characteristic feature of daily life is encountering people in groups. Surprisingly, however, at least during the initial stages of processing, research has focused almost exclusively on the construal of single individuals. As such, it remains unclear whether person and people (i.e., group) perception yield comparable or divergent outcomes. Addressing this issue, here we explored a core social-cognitive topic — stereotype activation — by presenting both single and multiple facial primes in a sequential-priming task. In addition, the processes underlying task performance were probed using a drift diffusion model analysis. Based on prior work, it was hypothesized that multiple (vs. single) primes would increase stereotype-based responding. Across two experiments, a consistent pattern of results emerged. First, stereotype priming was insensitive to the number of primes that were presented and occurred only at a short prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (i.e., 250 ms). Second, priming was underpinned by a bias toward congruent (vs. incongruent) prime-target responses. Collectively these findings advance understanding of the emergence and origin of stereotype priming during person and people perception.

日常生活的一个特点是与一群人相遇。然而，令人惊讶的是，至少在处理的最初阶段，研究几乎完全集中在单个个体的解释上。因此，目前尚不清楚人和人（即群体）的看法是否会产生可比或不同的结果。为了解决这个问题，我们在这里通过在顺序启动任务中呈现单个和多个面部启动来探索一个核心的社会认知主题——刻板印象激活。此外，还使用漂移扩散模型分析来探讨任务绩效的基础过程。根据之前的工作，假设多个（相对于单个）素数会增加基于刻板印象的反应。在两次实验中，出现了一致的结果模式。首先，刻板印象启动对所呈现的启动数不敏感，并且仅在短的启动-目标刺激开始异步（即250毫秒）时发生。其次，启动效应的基础是对一致（与不一致）主要目标反应的偏见。总的来说，这些发现促进了对人和人们感知过程中刻板印象启动的出现和起源的理解。