Mechanisms of Facial Stereotyping

When people encounter others, they quickly infer personality traits from their faces such as how trustworthy or competent they appear to be. These initial impressions are formed instantaneously, and although they are typically inaccurate, they strongly guide people's behavior and predict real-world outcomes (e.g., job offers, prison sentences). Recently, researchers have mapped specific facial features that drive particular impressions (e.g., downward-turned lips are untrustworthy) with incredible precision, but this work has focused on homogenous targets (e.g., White male faces) and generally ignored gender, race, and other group memberships. Separately, researchers have long known that stereotypes related to gender, race, and other group memberships strongly bias impressions regardless of any role of facial features. These group-based biases have profound consequences and can drive social inequities such as gender and racial disparities in society. However, little is known about how people’s mappings of facial features to specific impressions change across group boundaries, such as when encountering individuals who vary in gender, race, or are members of an ingroup or an outgroup. By examining the mutual roles of both facial appearance stereotypes and group stereotypes, this project develops an integrated model of how social judgments are initially formed and the neural mechanisms underlying these judgments. By integrating insights and techniques from across social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and vision science, this project can help identify effective interventions to reduce harmful social biases. In this project, explicit ratings, speed of judgment, and brain activity measures test how people cognitively integrate facial appearance stereotypes and group stereotypes, which results in their social judgments reflecting trade-offs between the two factors. Brain imaging helps identify the neural basis of this integration process with a hypothesized role of the anterior temporal lobe, a region of the brain involved in storing and retrieving social concepts. These findings advance new theoretical perspectives of a dynamic, rather than fixed, cognitive and neural architecture for forming impressions of others that varies by context, who is judging and who is being judged, and it is sensitive to social learning and experience. Facial appearance stereotypes determine real-world outcomes in many domains (e.g., legal, business, social), and group stereotypes foster a variety of societal inequities. The overarching goal of this project is to develop a precise understanding of how specific facial appearances, together with learned stereotypes about gender, race, or ingroup and outgroup membership, bias people’s behavior toward others. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.