Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When making inferences about another person (the target), perceivers often have to integrate multiple sources of informa-tion. This can include stereotypes about the targets groups (e.g., age, race, occupation) as well as other information aboutthe target (individuating information). In simple situations, perceivers approximate ideal Bayesian information integra-tion, relying more heavily on information that is more informative for the judgement. However under cognitive load withcognitive resources taken up by other demands people may instead rely on simplifying heuristics. We investigate severalpossible heuristics that people may use under load, including relying primarily on stereotypes rather than individuatinginformation, as suggested by previous research, and we test if and how these heuristics depend on how informative eachsource of information is. By clarifying how stereotypes are used in less-than-ideal cognitive conditions, this work hasimplications for when stereotypes will tend to be overused in real-world situations.