Chapter 4 part 1 - social perception

we do judge books by covers

• Form impressions of people from appearance

• Body, clothes, hair, movement, face

face “pop-out” effect"

• Human faces really capture our attention

• Even see faces, and attribute personality, where none exist
  ◦ “Pareidolia”

fast and very efficient face perception

• Willis and Todorov, 2006
  • Group 1: 100ms
  • Group 2: 500ms
  • Group 3: 1000ms
  • The ratings made by Group 1 were highly related to Group 2 and 3.
  • Can form impressions of others extremely quickly from faces

fusiform face area

• Region of the brain that responds mostly to human
  faces

• Likely because we have so much experience with faces

dimensions of person perception

• friendly, warm, trustworthy, caring, dominant, intelligent, etc.

overgeneralization hypothesis

• We infer personality characteristics based on similarity of one’s appearance with learned associations
  • Babyfacedness
  ◦ To the extent a face has baby-like characteristics, we infer target has similar personality (warm, innocent, kind, weak,
  submissive) and have urges to act similarly to target (be caregiving and gentle) (Zebrowitz & McDonald, 1991)

overgeneralization hypothesis

• Emotion overgeneralization
  • People’s neutral resting faces naturally vary
  • Resemblances to angry or happy emotional expressions lead perceivers to infer those characteristics in personality
  • Slightly upturned lips = “Happy, friendly”
  • Slightly downturned brow = “Mean, aggressive”

overgeneralization hypothesis

• body position matters too (Witkower & Tracy, 2019)

• even generalize this to similar others: more likely to trust someone if they look similar to someone you know is trustworthy (FeldmanHall et al, 2018)

not just faces

• Participants saw faces only, bodies only, or both and rated different traits

• Researchers calculated how much the trait impression was due to the face, body, or interaction of the two (Hu & O’Toole, 2023)

appearance mostly not accurate

• Few exceptions to this – e.g., extraversion
  ◦ Presumably because related to attractiveness and practice at being social
  ◦ More a product of experience/nurture than genetics/nature

• but appearance does predict stuff because humans use it (ex) voting for the leader who looks more competent because we think they will be more competent)

• Study looked at court cases of 213 criminal youth in 75 groups - who was the leader and who got punished more?

but does predict stuff because humans use it

• Baby-faced defendants are more likely to win in cases that involve intentional wrongdoing (Zebrowitz & McDonald, 1991)

• People recommend harsher punishments for babyfaced children’s transgressions (Zebrowitz et al., 1991)

• Perceived power of a CEO’s face predicts the company’s profits (Rule & Ambday, 2008)

  
  
  

appearance predicts…

• Dating decisions
  • Elections
  • Hiring
  • Promotions
  • Criminality (innocent/guilty decisions and sentencing)
  • Course evaluations
  • PROBABLY anything in which you can see the person

emerges early in development

• Children make similar inferences from faces as adults
  do (by age 5, similar levels to adults)

appearance summary

• We use others’ appearance to make inferences into
  their personality
  ◦ Bodies, clothes, face, etc
  • We are mostly NOT accurate (from their faces, but are about some things)
  • But we DO use it, even when we actively try to not use it
  • And because most humans do it, appearance predicts
  outcomes