SOCIAL CATEGORIZATION—in a constantly changing social world where such classifications of others are becoming increasingly complex, one’s ability to deal with inconsistencies is essential to maintaining coherent representations of them. For instance, increasing multiculturalism means that ethnic identities no longer map directly onto national identities. Occupational roles are becoming decreasingly gender stereotypical. As categories combine in sometimes counterstereotypical and consequently surprising ways (female engineers, male nurses; see Hastie, Schroeder, & Weber, 1990; Kunda, Miller, & Claire, 1990), perceivers must process and incorporate information that is inconsistent with their expectancies. It is well established that dealing with inconsistent information in impression formation is cognitively effortful (Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990), but it is unclear now how such processes of impression formation interact when one is dealing with surprising category combinations. The present study extended recent research on the composition of category conjunctions (Hutter & Crisp, 2005) to test whether and how the resource-consuming processes of resolving inconsistency affect the impressions that one forms about people who are defined by a surprising combination of social categorizations. Kunda et al.(1990) found that when one perceives a surprising category combination, participants generated emergent attributes, attributes associated with a conjunction that are independent of the constituent categories from which the