Search for Familiar and Dangerous : Not Seeing Gopnik in the Crowd

Subcultures frequently tend to have some distinct fashion style, which eventually becomes their “trademark” and drifts to the common knowledge of one culture or another. However, to what extent can these characteristics of certain groups be intervened with vast cultural heritage? We examined the influence of specific features of “gopnik” fashion on visual search performance. We conducted two experiments to investigate familiarity and threatening effects of these objects in visual search. Overall, our results demonstrate visual search asymmetry for man-like and gopnik-like objects, which could not be explained by basic features differences of these stimuli. We suggest that nowadays in Russia gopniks are represented as familiar group, rather than dangerous