Abstract
Primary categories are human’s inherent, nature endowed and specific categories, such as sex, age, race and emotion. Secondary categories are individual acquired, environmental impacting and abstract categories, like occupation, religion and stratum.
Past research has found that the influence between primary social categories is mutual. And there are two forms of interaction between primary social categories which are symmetry and asymmetry. Specifically, symmetry interaction means that category X affects the processing of category Y, and category Y also affects the processing of category X. For example, Carpinella, Chen, Hamilton and Johnson (2015) found that as faces become more feminine, people are more likely to classify faces as white and less likely to classify as black. When category X affects the processing of category Y, and category Y does not affect the processing of category X. This situation is called "asymmetric interaction". Using the Garner paradigm, Karnadewi and Lipps(2011) found that gender affects face’s emotional classification, that is, when the sex and emotion of target face change simultaneously, the reaction time of individual emotional classification is slower than that of emotional change but gender invariant. But emotion does not affect the classification of gender faces. It is worth noting that when three or more categories interact, there is only symmetric interaction between the categories. Martin and his colleagues(2015) found that any two unnoticed changes in social categories increase the individual's response to the third social category.The influence between primary social category and secondary social category is also mutual, but up to now, there is no study to show whether the interaction is symmetric or asymmetric.
On the other hand, The interaction between primary social categories is caused by top-down social concepts such as stereotype overlapping and bottom-up category cues. Bottom-up phenotypic cues lead to interaction between categories. For example, Klothia Dammn Schweinberger and Wiese(2015) found that skin texture plays an important role in the interaction between facial age and facial sex. Gender cues for faces vary according to ethnic categories (e.g. eye size, nose size, Craigg, Koch, & Lipp, 2016). In addition, Freeman et al. (2011) found that occupational phenotypic cues affect ethnic categorization. Therefore, the interaction between primary social categories and primary and secondary social categories may be affected by bottom-up cues. Furthermore, a great deal of research has found that top-down stereotype overlapping lead to interaction between primary social categories. For example, Stolier and Freeman(2016, 2017), using the mouse tracking paradigm , found that the individual's own unique stereotype association influence can predict their category processing , and the similarity between the categories of overlapping stereotype is reflected as the similarity between the right fusiform gyrus (RFG) and the orbital frontal cortex (OFC) activation pattern. More importantly, the interaction of these social categories cannot be explained by only the similarity of bottom-up visual cues. In contrast, the top-down stereotypes overlap link seemingly unrelated categories together. Although a small number of studies have shown that the interaction between primary social category and secondary social category is caused by bottom-up category cues and there is an overlap of stereotypes between the two categories, there is still no research to prove the role of stereotype overlap in this interaction.
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Primary Social Category and Secondary Social Category: the Interaction Among Multiple Social Categories[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2022, 45(2): 506-511
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