The role of personal control motivation in the processing and categorization of racially and gender ambiguous faces

The need for personal control, or perceived control over one’s life, stems from the broader human need to perceive the world as nonrandom, orderly and structured. When people lack personal control, they can defend their overarching belief in an orderly and structured world by seeking out external sources of control and structure. Social categories are one such source of structure because they hierarchically order individuals into discrete groups that differ in terms of status and power. The overarching goal of this doctoral dissertation research was to examine if the basic motive for personal control underlies the processing and categorization of racially and gender ambiguous faces. In Studies 1A through 1C, I pretested a set of prototypical male and female faces, create and pretest a set of gender ambiguous faces, and pilot test a measure of ambiguous face processing and categorizations. In Study 2, I created and pretested a set of racially ambiguous faces. In Studies 3A and 3B, I established the association between individual differences in need for personal control and heuristic ambiguous face processing in the domains of race and gender. In Study 4, I pretested a manipulation of personal control to be used in subsequent studies. In Studies 5A and 5B, I tested the main effect of having versus lacking personal control on the processing and categorization of racially (5B) and gender (5A-B) ambiguous faces. Finally, in Study 6, I found that personal control threat may be more likely to exert an effect on ambiguous person perception among people high in prejudice against ambiguous others or entitativity beliefs, though these results must be interpreted cautiously. Collectively, my dissertation research did not reveal a general effect of personal control motivation on ambiguous person perception, but provides preliminary support that this relation emerges among people high or low on certain attributes.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Alexandra K. Margevic