Steve Neuberg: Arizona State University Department of Psychology

Traditional psychological and social science theories fail to account for the complexity and nuance that characterize people’s prejudices and the manner in which, more generally, people view and interact with one another. I am developing an alternative, functional, affordance-based model, one positing (1) that our views of others are based on our inferences about their goals, the behavioral strategies they employ to reach them, and the tangible threats and opportunities afforded us by those strategies, and (2) that these goal and strategy inferences are themselves heuristically inferred from others’ life history standing (i.e., age X sex categorization) in combination with stereotypes about the behavioral strategies favored by the different physical and social ecologies in which people live (i.e., “ecology stereotypes”). This vertically integrative framework-linking life history and ecological considerations to person perception processes-provides a more compelling account for a wide range of psychological and social phenomena related to intergroup stereotypes and prejudices, within-coalition stereotypes and prejudices, various social-cognitive biases, and the general accuracy of person perception and stereotypes.