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A nonverbal person judgment task was used to address two general questions regarding the structure of implicit person schemas: (1) Does the pattern of perceived similarity among individuals differ depending on whether traits or person types are the basis of categorization? (2) Is the structure of person types hierarchically ordered by age and sex?. Subjects sorted a set of 140 facial photographs under one of three different instructional conditions that encouraged sorting by similarity of traits, character type, or physical features. Resulting co-occurrence matrices differed substantially between the trait sorting and type sorting conditions, whereas type sortings and physical feature sorts were highly similar. Individual sortings in the character type instructional condition were partitioned by age and sex of photos, although subjects did not seem to be explicitly aware of the role of age and sex in their category structure. Further, sex and perceived age of persons in photos were the primary predictors of frequency of co-occurrence for the type sortings, but were less predictive of co-occurrence in the trait sorting condition.
Brewer et al. (Fri,) studied this question.