Dress is a Fundamental Component of Person Perception.

ACADEMIC ABSTRACT: Clothing, hairstyle, makeup, and accessories influence first impressions. However, target dress is notably absent from current theories and models of person perception. We discuss three reasons for this minimal attention to dress in person perception: high theoretical complexity, incompatibility with traditional methodology, and underappreciation by the groups who have historically guided research in person perception. We propose a working model of person perception that incorporates target dress alongside target face, target body, context, and perceiver characteristics. Then, we identify four types of inferences for which perceivers rely on target dress: social categories, cognitive states, status, and aesthetics. For each of these, we review relevant work in social cognition, integrate this work with existing dress research, and propose future directions. Finally, we identify and offer solutions to the theoretical and methodological challenges accompanying the psychological study of dress. PUBLIC ABSTRACT: Why is it that people often agonize over what to wear for a job interview, a first date, or a party? The answer is simple: They understand that others' first impressions of them rely on their clothing, hairstyle, makeup, and accessories. Many people might be surprised, then, to learn that psychologists' theories about how people form first impressions of others have little to say about how people dress. This is true in part because the meaning of clothing is so complex and culturally dependent. We propose a working model of first impressions that identifies four types of information that people infer from dress: people's social identities, mental states, status, and aesthetic tastes. For each of these, we review existing research on clothing, integrate this research with related work from social psychology more broadly, and propose future directions for research.

Stereotypes shape response competition when forming impressions.

Dynamic models of impression formation posit that bottom-up factors (e.g., a target's facial features) and top-down factors (e.g., perceiver knowledge of stereotypes) continuously interact over time until a stable categorization or impression emerges. Most previous work on the dynamic resolution of judgments over time has focused on either categorization (e.g., "is this person male/female?") or specific trait impressions (e.g., "is this person trustworthy?"). In two mousetracking studies-exploratory (N = 226) and confirmatory (N = 300)-we test a domain-general effect of cultural stereotypes shaping the process underlying impressions of targets. We find that the trajectories of participants' mouse movements gravitate toward impressions congruent with their stereotype knowledge. For example, to the extent that a participant reports knowledge of a "Black men are less [trait]" stereotype, their mouse trajectory initially gravitates toward categorizing individual Black male faces as "less [trait]," regardless of their final judgment of the target.

Evaluating validity properties of 25 race-related scales.

Racial attitudes, beliefs, and motivations lie at the center of many influential theories of prejudice and discrimination. The extent to which such theories can meaningfully explain behavior hinges on accurate measurement of these latent constructs. We evaluated the validity properties of 25 race-related scales in a sample of 910,066 respondents using various tools, including dynamic fit indices, item response theory, and nomological nets. Despite showing adequate internal reliability, many scales demonstrated poor model fit and had latent score distributions showing clear floor or ceiling effects, results that illustrate deficiencies in these measures' ability to capture their intended latent construct. Nomological nets further suggested that the theoretical space of "racial prejudice" is crowded with scales that may not capture meaningfully distinct latent constructs. We provide concrete recommendations for both scale selection and scale renovation and outline implications for overlooking measurement issues in the study of prejudice and discrimination.

Same-sex marriage legalization associated with reduced implicit and explicit antigay bias.

The current research tested whether the passing of government legislation, signaling the prevailing attitudes of the local majority, was associated with changes in citizens' attitudes. Specifically, with ∼1 million responses over a 12-y window, we tested whether state-by-state same-sex marriage legislation was associated with decreases in antigay implicit and explicit bias. Results across five operationalizations consistently provide support for this possibility. Both implicit and explicit bias were decreasing before same-sex marriage legalization, but decreased at a sharper rate following legalization. Moderating this effect was whether states passed legislation locally. Although states passing legislation experienced a greater decrease in bias following legislation, states that never passed legislation demonstrated increased antigay bias following federal legalization. Our work highlights how government legislation can inform individuals' attitudes, even when these attitudes may be deeply entrenched and socially and politically volatile.

Best research practices for using the Implicit Association Test.

Interest in unintended discrimination that can result from implicit attitudes and stereotypes (implicit biases) has stimulated many research investigations. Much of this research has used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure association strengths that are presumed to underlie implicit biases. It had been more than a decade since the last published treatment of recommended best practices for research using IAT measures. After an initial draft by the first author, and continuing through three subsequent drafts, the 22 authors and 14 commenters contributed extensively to refining the selection and description of recommendation-worthy research practices. Individual judgments of agreement or disagreement were provided by 29 of the 36 authors and commenters. Of the 21 recommended practices for conducting research with IAT measures presented in this article, all but two were endorsed by 90% or more of those who felt knowledgeable enough to express agreement or disagreement; only 4% of the totality of judgments expressed disagreement. For two practices that were retained despite more than two judgments of disagreement (four for one, five for the other), the bases for those disagreements are described in presenting the recommendations. The article additionally provides recommendations for how to report procedures of IAT measures in empirical articles.

Little Between-Region and Between-Country Variance When People Form Impressions of Others.

To what extent are perceivers' first impressions of other individuals dictated by cultural background rather than personal idiosyncrasies? To address this question, we analyzed a globally diverse data set containing 11,481 adult participants' ratings of 120 targets across 45 countries (2,597,624 total ratings). Across ratings of 13 traits, we found that perceivers' idiosyncratic differences accounted for approximately 29% of variance and impressions on their own and approximately 16% in conjunction with target characteristics. However, country- and region-level differences, here a proxy for culture, accounted for 3.2% on average (i.e., both alone and in conjunction with target characteristics). We replicated this pattern of effects in a preregistered analysis on an entirely novel data set containing 7,007 participants' ratings of 100 targets across 41 countries (24,886 total ratings). Together, these results suggest that perceivers' impressions of other people are largely dictated by their individual characteristics and local environment rather than their cultural background.

Facial Impressions Are Predicted by the Structure of Group Stereotypes.

Impressions of other people's faces (e.g., trustworthiness) have long been thought to be evoked by morphological variation (e.g., upturned mouth) in a universal, fixed manner. However, recent research suggests that these impressions vary considerably across perceivers and targets' social-group memberships. Across 4,247 U.S. adults recruited online, we investigated whether racial and gender stereotypes may be a critical factor underlying this variability in facial impressions. In Study 1, we found that not only did facial impressions vary by targets' gender and race, but also the structure of these impressions was associated with the structure of stereotype knowledge. Study 2 extended these findings by demonstrating that individual differences in perceivers' own unique stereotype associations predicted the structure of their own facial impressions. Together, the findings suggest that the structure of people's impressions of others' faces is driven not only by the morphological variation of the face but also by learned stereotypes about social groups.

The conceptual structure of face impressions.

Humans seamlessly infer the expanse of personality traits from others' facial appearance. These facial impressions are highly intercorrelated within a structure known as "face trait space." Research has extensively documented the facial features that underlie face impressions, thus outlining a bottom-up fixed architecture of face impressions, which cannot account for important ways impressions vary across perceivers. Classic theory in impression formation emphasized that perceivers use their lay conceptual beliefs about how personality traits correlate to form initial trait impressions, for instance, where trustworthiness of a target may inform impressions of their intelligence to the extent one believes the two traits are related. This considered, we explore the possibility that this lay "conceptual trait space"-how perceivers believe personality traits correlate in others-plays a role in face impressions, tethering face impressions to one another, thus shaping face trait space. In study 1, we found that conceptual and face trait space explain considerable variance in each other. In study 2, we found that participants with stronger conceptual associations between two traits judged those traits more similarly in faces. Importantly, using a face image classification task, we found in study 3 that participants with stronger conceptual associations between two traits used more similar facial features to make those two face trait impressions. Together, these findings suggest lay beliefs of how personality traits correlate may underlie trait impressions, and thus face trait space. This implies face impressions are not only derived bottom up from facial features, but also shaped by our conceptual beliefs.

Blacks' Death Rate Due to Circulatory Diseases Is Positively Related to Whites' Explicit Racial Bias.

Perceptions of racial bias have been linked to poorer circulatory health among Blacks compared with Whites. However, little is known about whether Whites' actual racial bias contributes to this racial disparity in health. We compiled racial-bias data from 1,391,632 Whites and examined whether racial bias in a given county predicted Black-White disparities in circulatory-disease risk (access to health care, diagnosis of a circulatory disease; Study 1) and circulatory-disease-related death rate (Study 2) in the same county. Results revealed that in counties where Whites reported greater racial bias, Blacks (but not Whites) reported decreased access to health care (Study 1). Furthermore, in counties where Whites reported greater racial bias, both Blacks and Whites showed increased death rates due to circulatory diseases, but this relationship was stronger for Blacks than for Whites (Study 2). These results indicate that racial disparities in risk of circulatory disease and in circulatory-disease-related death rate are more pronounced in communities where Whites harbor more explicit racial bias.

Amygdala responsivity to high-level social information from unseen faces.

Previous research shows that the amygdala automatically responds to a face's trustworthiness when a face is clearly visible. However, it is unclear whether the amygdala could evaluate such high-level facial information without a face being consciously perceived. Using a backward masking paradigm, we demonstrate in two functional neuroimaging experiments that the human amygdala is sensitive to subliminal variation in facial trustworthiness. Regions in the amygdala tracked how untrustworthy a face appeared (i.e., negative-linear responses) as well as the overall strength of a face's trustworthiness signal (i.e., nonlinear responses), despite faces not being subjectively seen. This tracking was robust across blocked and event-related designs and both real and computer-generated faces. The findings demonstrate that the amygdala can be influenced by even high-level facial information before that information is consciously perceived, suggesting that the amygdala's processing of social cues in the absence of awareness may be more extensive than previously described.

Self-enhancement influences medial frontal cortex alpha power to social rejection feedback.

Although previous research has demonstrated that individuals are motivated to self-enhance, the neurocognitive mechanisms and temporal dynamics of self-enhancement are poorly understood. The current research examined whether self-enhancing motivations affect the perceptual processing of social feedback. Participants who varied in self-enhancement motivations received accept and reject feedback while EEG was recorded. Following this task, we measured perceptions of feedback by asking participants to estimate the number of times they were rejected. Source localization and time-frequency analyses revealed that alpha power in the medial frontal cortex (MFC) completely mediated the relationship between self-enhancement motivations and rejection estimates. Specifically, greater self-enhancement motivations predicted decreased MFC alpha power to reject compared to accept feedback, which predicted decreased rejection estimates. These findings suggest that self-enhancement motivations decrease perception of social rejection by influencing how the MFC processes social feedback.

The neural basis of stereotypic impact on multiple social categorization.

Perceivers extract multiple social dimensions from another's face (e.g., race, emotion), and these dimensions can become linked due to stereotypes (e.g., Black individuals → angry). The current research examined the neural basis of detecting and resolving conflicts between top-down stereotypes and bottom-up visual information in person perception. Participants viewed faces congruent and incongruent with stereotypes, via variations in race and emotion, while neural activity was measured using fMRI. Hand movements en route to race/emotion responses were recorded using mouse-tracking to behaviorally index individual differences in stereotypical associations during categorization. The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) showed stronger activation to faces that violated stereotypical expectancies at the intersection of multiple social categories (i.e., race and emotion). These regions were highly sensitive to the degree of incongruency, exhibiting linearly increasing responses as race and emotion became stereotypically more incongruent. Further, the ACC exhibited greater functional connectivity with the lateral fusiform cortex, a region implicated in face processing, when viewing stereotypically incongruent (relative to congruent) targets. Finally, participants with stronger behavioral tendencies to link race and emotion stereotypically during categorization showed greater dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation to stereotypically incongruent targets. Together, the findings provide insight into how conflicting stereotypes at the nexus of multiple social dimensions are resolved at the neural level to accurately perceive other people.

Prejudice model 1.0: A predictive model of prejudice.

The present research develops a predictive model of prejudice. For nearly a century, psychology and other fields have sought to scientifically understand and describe the causes of prejudice. Numerous theories of prejudice now exist. Yet these theories are overwhelmingly defined verbally and thus lack the ability to precisely predict when and to what extent prejudice will emerge. The abundance of theory also raises the possibility of undetected overlap between constructs theorized to cause prejudice. Predictive models enable falsification and provide a way for the field to move forward. To this end, here we present 18 studies with ∼5,000 participants in seven phases of model development. After initially identifying major theorized causes of prejudice in the literature, we used a model selection approach to winnow constructs into a parsimonious predictive model of prejudice (Phases I and II). We confirm this model in a preregistered out-of-sample test (Phase III), test variations in operationalizations and boundary conditions (Phases IV and V), and test generalizability on a U.S. representative sample, an Indian sample, and a U.K. sample (Phase VI). Finally, we consulted the predictions of experts in the field to examine how well they align with our results (Phase VII). We believe this initial predictive model is limited and bad, but by developing a model that makes highly specific predictions, drawing on the state of the art, we hope to provide a foundation from which research can build to improve science of prejudice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Facial structure is indicative of explicit support for prejudicial beliefs.

We present three studies examining whether male facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) is correlated with racial prejudice and whether observers are sensitive to fWHR when assessing prejudice in other people. Our results indicate that males with a greater fWHR are more likely to explicitly endorse racially prejudicial beliefs, though fWHR was unrelated to implicit bias. Participants evaluated targets with a greater fWHR as more likely to be prejudiced and accurately evaluated the degree to which targets reported prejudicial attitudes. Finally, compared with majority-group members, racial-minority participants reported greater motivation to accurately evaluate prejudice. This motivation mediated the relationship between minority- or majority-group membership and the accuracy of evaluations of prejudice, which indicates that motivation augments sensitivity to fWHR. Together, the results of these three studies demonstrate that fWHR is a reliable indicator of explicitly endorsed racial prejudice and that observers can use fWHR to accurately assess another person's explicit prejudice.

Local Legislation is Associated With Regional Transgender Attitudes.

Using a newly developed measure of implicit transgender attitudes, we investigate the association between state-level antitransgender policies and individual-level attitudes about transgender people among residents. In a large sample of U.S. participants (N = 211,133), we find that individuals living in states with more discriminatory policies against transgender people (e.g., not allowing changes to one's gender identity on official identity papers) exhibited more negative implicit and explicit transgender attitudes. This pattern held after controlling for participant race and gender, as well as when looking only at cisgender participants. These findings extend prior work concerning how intergroup biases relate to regional characteristics such as legislation and do so in a novel and consequential context. This research also informs ongoing work concerning the role of policy-making and social norms on the development and expression of intergroup prejudice.

Everyday Perceiver-Context Influences on Impression Formation: No Evidence of Consistent Effects.

Facial impressions (e.g., trustworthy, intelligent) vary considerably across different perceivers and targets. However, nearly all existing research comes from participants evaluating faces on a computer screen in a lab or office environment. We explored whether social perceptions could additionally be influenced by perceivers' experiential factors that vary in daily life: mood, environment, physiological state, and psychological situations. To that end, we tracked daily changes in participants' experienced contexts during impression formation using experience sampling. We found limited evidence that perceivers' contexts are an important factor in impressions. Perceiver context alone does not systematically influence trait impressions in a consistent manner-suggesting that perceiver and target idiosyncrasies are the most powerful drivers of social impressions. Overall, results suggest that perceivers' experienced contexts may play only a small role in impressions formed from faces.

Implicit bias predicts less willingness and less frequent adoption of Black children more than explicit bias.

In the United States, prospective adoptive parents often express preferences related to race. In two studies, we examined whether implicit racial bias against Black people may contribute to disparities in much less willingness to adopt Black children. The first study (N = 510) assessed individuals' implicit racial bias and their willingness to adopt a Black child. The second study (N = 2,001,652) used U.S. state-level implicit racial bias to predict adoption rates of Black foster children in each U.S. state. Greater implicit racial bias predicted less willingness to adopt Black children and less frequent adoptions of Black foster children. Implicit bias contributed to these disparities above and beyond explicit bias, with implicit bias having a 43% larger effect size than explicit bias on willingness to adopt a Black child. These are the first findings to demonstrate the role implicit bias plays in explaining large disparities between Americans' willingness to adopt Black and White children.

Group status drives majority and minority integration preferences.

This research examined preferences for national- and campus-level assimilative and pluralistic policies among Black and White students under different contexts, as majority- and minority-group members. We targeted attitudes at two universities, one where 85% of the student body is White, and another where 76% of students are Black. The results revealed that when a group constituted the majority, its members generally preferred assimilationist policies, and when a group constituted the minority, its members generally preferred pluralistic policies. The results support a functional perspective: Both majority and minority groups seek to protect and enhance their collective identities.

Parsing the Mechanisms Underlying Ingroup Facial Resemblance.

People prefer to form relationships with people like themselves-a tendency that extends even to facial appearance, resulting in groups whose members look alike. Here, we investigated the mechanisms underlying homophilic resemblance using facial photos of fraternity/sorority members from two time points: before joining the group and after belonging to the group for three years. Analyses of both subjective trait impressions and objective face-shape measurements revealed that not only did group members look alike, they resembled one another even before joining the group. Moreover, photos of potential fraternity recruits revealed that facial appearance predicted both the group that individuals sought to join and the group's likelihood of accepting them. Individuals, therefore, seek to join groups consisting of people who look like them, and the groups preferentially accept new members who resemble those already in the group. This bidirectional preference for homophily likely perpetuates intragroup homogeneity, suggesting potential implications beyond appearance.

The relevance appraisal matrix: Evaluating others' relevance.

People seek to detect who facilitates and who impedes their goal pursuit. The resulting relevance appraisals of opportunity and threat, respectively, can strongly shape subsequent social judgment and behavior. However, important questions about the nature of relevance appraisals remain unanswered: Are relevance appraisals unidimensional or multidimensional? Are people evaluated as generally posing opportunities and/or threats, or as dynamically relevant depending on perceiver goals? We test two hypotheses. First, we propose that opportunity and threat are appraised independently, rather than as endpoints of a single dimension. If so, then others can be evaluated as (a) facilitating a goal, (b) impeding a goal, (c) both facilitating and impeding a goal, or (d) neither facilitating nor impeding a goal. Second, we hypothesize that relevance appraisals shift dynamically with perceiver goals. For example, a single person may be appraised as facilitating one's mate-seeking goal, but as neither facilitating nor impeding one's self-protection goal. In two studies, participants rated the extent to which a variety of targets (e.g., a doctor, a 5-year-old child) pose threats and opportunities to different goals. Confirmatory factor analyses support both hypotheses. We also explore relationships between the Relevance Appraisal Matrix and the stereotype content (Fiske et al., 2002) and ABC (Koch et al., 2016) models of stereotypes, finding evidence that relevance appraisals are distinct from stereotypes of group attributes. In sum, we provide a framework for understanding the structure of relevance appraisals: A central and consequential, yet dynamic and relatively understudied, aspect of social cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).