People Watching: Social Perception and the Ensemble Coding of Bodies

Bodies are rich and important social stimuli, which we often encounter in the context of social groups. Yet, little attention has been paid to how we process these groups, and what information perceivers might extract from groups of bodies. Drawing from work on the perception of individual bodies, we conducted two studies to test the ability of human observers (college students; Ntotal = 375) to ensemble code (i.e., rapidly extract summary statistics about attributes of stimulus groups) human bodies. Specifically, we examined whether participants extracted summary statistics of lower-level (body mass index, waist-to-chest ratio, and waist-to-hip ratio) and higher-level (emotion, gender) properties from groups of bodies. Participants were relatively accurate in extracting summary statistics for both lower-level and higher-level characteristics from groups of bodies, consistent with the view that visual processes rapidly summarize group characteristics from bodily information.