Impressions of Danger Influence Impressions of People: An Evolutionary Perspective on Individual and Collective Cognition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An evolutionary approach to social cognition yields novel hypotheses about the perception of people belonging to specific kinds of social categories. These implications are illustrated by empirical results linking the perceived threat of physical injury to stereotypical impressions of outgroups. We review a set of studies revealing several ways in which threat-connoting cues influence perceptions of ethnic outgroups and the individuals who belong to those outgroups. We also present new results that suggest additional implications of evolved danger-avoidance mechanisms on interpersonal communication and the persistence of cultural-level stereotypes about ethnic outgroups. The conceptual utility of an evolutionary approach is further illustrated by a parallel line of research linking the threat of disease to additional kinds of social perceptions and behaviors. Evolved danger-avoidance mechanisms appear to contribute in diverse ways to individual-level cognitive processes, as well as to culturally-shared collective beliefs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".