Learning to judge a book by its cover: Rapid acquisition of facial stereotypes☆
Section snippets
Study 1A
In the present study, we test whether arbitrarily learned feature–behavior associations affect the trait evaluation of faces, resulting in novel facial stereotypes. First, participants engage in a short learning phase wherein faces with thin sellions were associated with trustworthy behaviors 80% of the time and faces with wide sellions were associated with untrustworthy behaviors 80% of the time. We then assess the amount of money participants pay in an economic trust game to a new set of
Study 1B
It is possible that the effects in payment in Study 1A are somehow limited to the feature–behavior associations used for that study, namely that narrow sellions were learned to be trustworthy and wide sellions learned to be untrustworthy. In Study 1B, we aim to replicate the effects with the counterbalanced associations (narrow sellion = untrustworthy, wide sellion = trustworthy).
Study 2
In Study 1, we showed that an arbitrary, newly learned facial stereotype can impact to what extent participants trusted targets in the context of an economic game. In Study 2, we extended these results to another consequential domain in which facial stereotyping can readily bias outcomes, namely hiring and candidate selection processes. We implement the same training regimen as in Study 1, but we follow it with a line-up choice regarding which target individual participants would like to select
Study 3
In Studies 1A/1B and 2, we demonstrate that a brief learning period resulted in a novel facial stereotype that affected evaluations based on payment in an economic trust game and in choosing a personal financial advisor. However, while these newly learned associations clearly biased the outcomes of such explicit evaluations, it is unclear to what extent they activated automatically or biased evaluations early on in processing. Facial trustworthiness has long been known to activate automatic
Study 4
The previous studies show that a brief training resulted in a novel facial stereotype that can impact explicit judgments of trustworthiness and has an early impact on evaluative processing in parallel with “intrinsic” facial trustworthiness features. One open question is to what extent this novel facial stereotype is automatized and has an impact on more implicit measures of evaluation. This would cast doubt on the possibility that the previous effects are mere artifacts of demand
Study 5
One distinct possibility throughout the previous studies is that participants were explicitly aware of the sellion-width association with trustworthiness and that the shifts in evaluations observed in each study were driven by heuristics or rules guided by this awareness or by demand characteristics. Another potential issue to resolve is the extent to which the effects of the training phase are truly generalizing to the novel exemplars with the learned feature during the evaluation phase. In
Meta-analysis
To characterize the overall strength of the newly learned facial stereotype effect, we meta-analyzed Studies 1A, 1B, 4, and 5 using fixed effects, with effect size weighted by sample size (Goh, Hall, & Rosenthal, 2016). We did not include the mouse-tracking study (Study 3) as the predicted empirical pattern in that study (Sellion Width × Facial Trustworthiness interaction on mouse-trajectory attraction) was qualitatively different than the other studies (effect of Sellion Width on evaluations).
General discussion
Overall, we demonstrate that newly learned associations between an arbitrary facial feature and valenced behaviors resulted in the creation of a novel facial stereotype associated with sellion width, which exerted an equal – if not stronger – effect to the long-established trustworthiness of the face on evaluations. These results arose in payments allocated in an economic trust game and in the choice of hiring a financial advisor, demonstrating how these newly learned facial stereotype
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the NSF BCS-1654731. We thank Michael Berkebile and Maryam Beshar for their assistance with the studies. We thank Dr. Chu Chang Chua for her continued guidance.
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This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Dr. Jack Rachael.