Are Person Categories Used When Organizing Information about Unfamiliar Sets of Persons?

It has long been tacitly assumed that perceivers spontaneously organize social information, such as traits and behaviors, into individualized person gestalts. The validity of this assumption was questioned in research by Ostrom and Pryor that examined how perceivers organize information in multiperson, multiattribute perceptual fields (e.g., a party, a group discussion, or a criminal trial setting). Their data indicated that in such situations social information about unfamiliar others is not organized around persons. This paper reports a meta-analysis of 44 published and unpublished person organization studies. This increase in statistical power afforded by meta-analysis led to a rejection of Ostrom and Pryor's earlier conclusions. Perceivers were found to have a significant (although not large) tendency toward organizing social information around person categories, thus supporting the assumption of the early impression formation theorists.