Spatial Representation Of Social Categorization

Social Categorization is a subjective mental process in which individuals divide others into different groups based on shared similarity.It is a natural and spontaneous process of distinguishing oneself from others,oneself group and others group.There are few domestic literatures concerning group spatial representation,and it is still an unknown black box.We present five experiments investigating the hypothesis that when membership is salient,there are spatial representations of the left and right dimensions of the social category.If the social category is a continuous variable,the trend of social SNARC-like effect will also appear.In order to verify these hypothesis,we take the ingroup and outgroups as the starting point,based on spatial bias,ingroup-outgroup effects,psychological distance theory,to explore whether spatial representation exists.Experiment 1 explores whether there is a spatial representation between social categorization(Ingroup,Outgroup)and response position(left hand,right hand)in the minimal group.Experiment 2 expanded the group size,and verified whether the social categorization(Chinese group,British group)and response position(left hand,right hand)spatial representation were stable in the general social group.In experiment 3,we investigated whether the location of the explicit stimulus(left and right)moderates the implicit spatial representation of social classification.Experiment 4 and 5 subdivided the social category on the basis of Experiment 2,and added Morph faces with different mixed feature ratios between Chinese faces and foreign faces,forming a sequence with Chinese faces as the starting point and ending point.To investigate the existence of Social SNARC-like effect in this sequence.The results found that:(1)In the minimal group and the general social group,social category has spatial representation,the left hand is connected with the ingroup,and the right hand is connected with the outgroup.(2)The spatial representation of social categorization is implicit and not affected by the location of explicit stimuli.(3)The sequential sequence of social classification can produce the trend of social SNARC-like effects.And this trend will be affected by learning,not as stable as numbers.