Racial Prejudice Affects Representations of Facial Trustworthiness.

What makes faces seem trustworthy? We investigated how racial prejudice predicts the extent to which perceivers employ racially prototypical cues to infer trustworthiness from faces. We constructed participant-level computational models of trustworthiness and White-to-Black prototypicality from U.S. college students' judgments of White (Study 1, N = 206) and Black-White morphed (Study 3, N = 386) synthetic faces. Although the average relationships between models differed across stimuli, both studies revealed that as participants' anti-Black prejudice increased and/or intergroup contact decreased, so too did participants' tendency to conflate White prototypical features with trustworthiness and Black prototypical features with untrustworthiness. Study 2 (N = 324) and Study 4 (N = 397) corroborated that untrustworthy faces constructed from participants with pro-White preferences appeared more Black prototypical to naive U.S. adults, relative to untrustworthy faces modeled from other participants. This work highlights the important role of racial biases in shaping impressions of facial trustworthiness.

Revising mental representations of faces based on new diagnostic information.

Extending evidence for the rapid revision of mental representations of what other people are like, we explored whether people also rapidly revise their representations of what others look like. After learning to ascribe positive or negative behavioral information to a target person and generating a visualization of their face in a reverse-correlation task, participants learned new information that was (a) counter-attitudinal and diagnostic about the person's character or (b) neutral and non-diagnostic, and then they generated a second visualization. Ratings of these visualizations in separate samples of participants consistently revealed revision effects: Time 2 visualizations assimilated to the counter-attitudinal information. Weaker revision effects also emerged after learning neutral information, suggesting that the evaluative extremity of visualizations may dilute when encountering any additional information. These findings indicate that representations of others' appearance may change upon learning more about them, particularly when this new information is counter-attitudinal and diagnostic.

Perspective taking reduces intergroup bias in visual representations of faces.

Intergroup biases shape most aspects of person construal, including lower-level visual representations of group members' faces. Specifically, ingroup members' faces tend to be represented more positively than outgroup members' faces. Here, we used a reverse-correlation paradigm to test whether engaging in perspective taking (i.e., actively imagining another person's mental states) can reduce these biased visual representations. In an initial image-generation experiment, participants were randomly assigned to a minimal group and then composed a narrative essay about an ingroup or an outgroup target person, either while adopting the person's perspective or while following control instructions. Afterward, they generated an image of the person's face in a reverse-correlation image-classification task. Subsequent image-assessment experiments using an explicit rating task, a sequential priming task, and an economic trust game with separate samples of participants revealed that ingroup faces elicited more likability and trustworthiness than did outgroup faces. Importantly, this pattern of intergroup bias was consistently weaker in faces created by perspective takers. Additional image-assessment experiments identified the mouth (i.e., smiling cues) as a critical facial region wherein the interactive effects of group membership and perspective taking emerged. These findings provide initial evidence that perspective taking may be an effective strategy for attenuating, though not for eliminating, intergroup biases in visual representations of what group members look like.

Retrieval cues fail to influence contextualized evaluations.

Initial evaluations generalise to new contexts, whereas counter-attitudinal evaluations are context-specific. Counter-attitudinal information may not change evaluations in new contexts because perceivers fail to retrieve counter-attitudinal cue-evaluation associations from memory outside the counter-attitudinal learning context. The current work examines whether an additional, counter-attitudinal retrieval cue can enhance the generalizability of counter-attitudinal evaluations. In four experiments, participants learned positive information about a target person, Bob, in one context, and then learned negative information about Bob in a different context. While learning the negative information, participants wore a wristband as a retrieval cue for counter-attitudinal Bob-negative associations. Participants then made speeded as well as deliberate evaluations of Bob while wearing or not wearing the wristband. Internal meta-analysis failed to find a reliable effect of the counter-attitudinal retrieval cue on speeded or deliberate evaluations, whereas the context cues influenced speeded and deliberate evaluations. Counter to predictions, counter-attitudinal retrieval cues did not disrupt the generalisation of first-learned evaluations or the context-specificity of second-learned evaluations (Experiments 2-4), but the counter-attitudinal retrieval cue did influence evaluations in the absence of context cues (Experiment 1). The current work provides initial evidence that additional counter-attitudinal retrieval cues fail to disrupt the renewal and generalizability of first-learned evaluations.