Humans infer men’s formidability through their facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR), subsequently eliciting perceptions of men’s capability to engage in aggressive physical conflict. Inferring formidable men as being particularly resistant to mental distress from physical conflict may pose downstream consequences, such as biasing mental health assessments that impede optimal treatment recommendations. Participants assessed potential mental distress of hypothetical military service members who varied in fWHR and indicated their willingness to assess and treat these symptoms. Formidable men were inferred as mentally tough, further biasing perceptions of them as not experiencing mental distress and not receiving subsequent care. We further replicated infrahumanization effects surrounding formidable men demonstrating individuals perceive them as less capable of feeling complex emotions, though treatment recommendations were driven by mental toughness perceptions rather than infrahumanization. Results are framed from an evolutionary perspective of affordance judgments. We discuss translational implications for clinical mental health.

人类通过面部宽高比（fWHR）推断男人的强大能力，随后引起人们对男人参与侵略性身体冲突的能力的认识。推断出强大的男性对身体冲突造成的精神困扰特别有抵抗力，这可能会带来下游后果，例如偏向妨碍最佳治疗建议的精神健康评估。参加者评估了假想服役人员的潜在心理困扰，这些人员在fWHR方面存在差异，并表示他们愿意评估和治疗这些症状。强大的男人被认为是精神强壮的人，这进一步使他们对他们没有遭受精神困扰并且没有得到后续护理的看法产生偏见。我们进一步复制了围绕强大男人的下位人类化效应，表明个人认为他们感觉不到复杂情绪的能力，尽管治疗建议是由心理韧性感知而非下位人类化驱动的。结果是从支付能力判断的进化角度来构架的。我们讨论了对临床心理健康的翻译意义。