Anchoring has little effect when forming first impressions of facial attractiveness.

First impressions based on facial appearance affect our behaviour towards others. Since the same face will appear different across images, over time, and so on, our impressions may not be equally weighted across exposures but are instead disproportionately influenced by earlier or later instances. Here, we followed up on previous work which identified an anchoring effect, whereby higher attractiveness ratings were given to a person after viewing naturally varying images of their face presented in descending (high-to-low), rather than ascending (low-to-high), order of attractiveness of these images. In Experiment 1 (n = 301), we compared these 'descending' and 'ascending' conditions for unfamiliar identities by presenting six-image sequences. Although we found higher attractiveness ratings for the 'descending' condition, this small effect equated to only 0.22 points on a 1-7 response scale. In Experiment 2 (n = 307), we presented these six-image sequences in a random order and found no difference in attractiveness ratings given to these randomly ordered sequences when compared with those resulting from both our 'descending' and 'ascending' conditions. Further, we failed to detect an influence of the earlier images in these random sequences on attractiveness ratings. Taken together, we found no compelling evidence that anchoring could have an effect on real-world impression formation.

Is Doing Good Good Enough? A Motivation, Action, Sacrifice, and Temptation (MAST) View of Moral Praiseworthiness.

We present the Motivation, Action, Sacrifice, and Temptation (MAST) view of moral praiseworthiness and evaluate four components shaping judgments of an actor's morality: (a) How did the person act? (b) Why did the person act? (c) Did the person sacrifice something when acting? and (d) Was the person tempted to avoid the sacrifice? Across multiple moral domains, we evaluate moral impressions of hypothetical actors who acted ostensibly morally under different motivational, sacrificial, and temptational conditions. Across four studies (total N > 1,200) and 150 morally relevant scenarios, all components shaped moral impressions, with motivational purity having the strongest impact. Exploring motivation more deeply via Self-Determination Theory, we found effects of internalized (vs. externalized) motivations. Broadly speaking, judges prefer actors to act automatically and in an idealized manner rather than with deliberation and effort. This work address questions that have fascinated philosophers, psychologists, and laypeople, advancing understanding of moral impression formation.

Helpful or harmful? The effect of a diagnostic label and its later retraction on person impressions.

Diagnostic labels for mental health conditions can inadvertently reinforce harmful stereotypes and exacerbate stigma. If a diagnosis is incorrect and a label is wrongly applied, this may negatively impact person impressions even if the inaccurate label is later corrected. This registered report examined this issue. Participants (N = 560) read a vignette about a hospital patient who was either diagnosed with schizophrenia, diagnosed with major depressive disorder, or not diagnosed with a mental health condition. The diagnostic labels were later retracted strongly, retracted weakly, or not retracted. Participants completed several stigma measures (desire for social distance, perceived dangerousness, and unpredictability), plus several inferential-reasoning measures that tested their reliance on the diagnostic label. As predicted, each mental health diagnosis elicited stigma, and influenced inferential reasoning. This effect was stronger for the schizophrenia diagnosis compared to the major depressive disorder diagnosis. Importantly, the diagnostic label continued to influence person judgments after a clear retraction (strong or weak), highlighting the limitations of corrections in reducing reliance on person-related misinformation and mental health stigma.

Perceptions of artificial intelligence system's aptitude to judge morality and competence amidst the rise of Chatbots.

This paper examines how humans judge the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) to evaluate human attributes, specifically focusing on two key dimensions of human social evaluation: morality and competence. Furthermore, it investigates the impact of exposure to advanced Large Language Models on these perceptions. In three studies (combined N = 200), we tested the hypothesis that people will find it less plausible that AI is capable of judging the morality conveyed by a behavior compared to judging its competence. Participants estimated the plausibility of AI origin for a set of written impressions of positive and negative behaviors related to morality and competence. Studies 1 and 3 supported our hypothesis that people would be more inclined to attribute AI origin to competence-related impressions compared to morality-related ones. In Study 2, we found this effect only for impressions of positive behaviors. Additional exploratory analyses clarified that the differentiation between the AI origin of competence and morality judgments persisted throughout the first half year after the public launch of popular AI chatbot (i.e., ChatGPT) and could not be explained by participants' general attitudes toward AI, or the actual source of the impressions (i.e., AI or human). These findings suggest an enduring belief that AI is less adept at assessing the morality compared to the competence of human behavior, even as AI capabilities continued to advance.

A second chance for first impressions: evidence for altered impression updating in borderline personality disorder.

BACKGROUND: Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) frequently alter between idealizing and devaluing other persons, which has been linked to an increased tendency to update self-relevant beliefs and impressions. We hypothesized that increased impression updating could stem from reduced attitude contextualization, i.e., a process in which impression-disconfirming information is linked to contextual cues. METHODS: Individuals diagnosed with BPD and controls (recruited online, with unknown diagnostic status) completed an impression formation paradigm. They first learned about the positive or negative behaviors of others in one Context A (e.g., Person 1 is helpful), followed by learning about behaviors of the opposite valence in a second Context B (Person 1 is rude). We also manipulated between participants whether the observed behaviors were directed toward the study participants (self-relevant) or, more generally, at other people (other-relevant). The contexts were marked by differently-colored backgrounds (e.g., yellow vs. blue), to avoid influences of prior knowledge or experiences. After exposure to information in both contexts, participants rated their impressions of the persons in Context A, Context B, and, crucially, a previously unknown Context C (white background). We examined whether the initial or an updated impression (re-)emerged in Context C. RESULTS: Initial impressions remained stable and dominated the ratings of controls across contexts A, B, and C for both self-relevant and other-relevant behaviors, consistent with contextualizing impression-disconfirming information. As expected, however, individuals with BPD only showed updated impression ratings in Context C for self-relevant behaviors, consistent with the assumed reduced tendency to contextualize impression-disconfirming self-relevant information. Further exploratory analyses suggest that more severe BPD symptoms predicted more pronounced impression updating in the self-relevant condition. CONCLUSIONS: The findings help to illuminate the mechanisms underlying interpersonal problems in individuals with BPD. People with BPD are not just more inclined to discard positive first impressions but to re-evaluate disliked others when they behave positively, contributing to the volatility of interactions with others. Contextualization has known and modifiable antecedents, and the study may thus provide potential targets for therapeutic intervention. Future studies will need to replicate the findings with specified controls.

Unconstrained Descriptions of Facebook Profile Pictures Support High-Dimensional Models of Impression Formation.

Dominant models of impression formation focus on two fundamental dimensions: a horizontal dimension of warmth/communion/trustworthiness and a vertical dimension of competence/agency/dominance. However, these models have typically been studied using theory-driven methods and stimuli of restricted complexity. We used a data-driven approach and naturalistic stimuli to explore the latent dimensions underlying >300,000 unconstrained linguistic descriptions of 1,000 Facebook profile pictures from 2,188 participants. Via traditional (Exploratory Factor Analysis) and modern (natural language dictionaries, semantic sentence embeddings) approaches, we observed impressions to form with regard to the horizontal and vertical dimensions and their respective facets of sociability/morality and ability/assertiveness, plus the key demographic variables of gender, age, and race. However, we also observed impressions to form along numerous further dimensions, including adventurousness, conservatism, fitness, non-conformity, and stylishness. These results serve to emphasize the importance of high-dimensional models of impression formation and help to clarify the content dimensions underlying unconstrained descriptions of individuals.

Social evaluative implications of sensory adaptation to human voices.

People form social evaluations of others following brief exposure to their voices, and these impressions are calibrated based on recent perceptual experience. Participants adapted to voices with fundamental frequency (f o; the acoustic correlate of perceptual pitch) manipulated to be gender-typical (i.e. masculine men and feminine women) or gender-atypical (i.e. feminine men and masculine women) before evaluating unaltered test voices within the same sex. Adaptation resulted in contrastive aftereffects. Listening to gender-atypical voices caused female voices to sound more feminine and attractive (Study 1) and male voices to sound more masculine and attractive (Study 2). Studies 3a and 3b tested whether adaptation occurred on a conceptual or perceptual level, respectively. In Study 3a, perceivers adapted to gender-typical or gender-atypical voices for both men and women (i.e. adaptors pitch manipulated in opposite directions for men and women) before evaluating unaltered test voices. Findings showed weak evidence that evaluations differed between conditions. In Study 3b, perceivers adapted to masculinized or feminized voices for both men and women (i.e. adaptors pitch manipulated in the same direction for men and women) before evaluating unaltered test voices. In the feminized condition, participants rated male targets as more masculine and attractive. Conversely, in the masculinized condition, participants rated female targets as more feminine and attractive. Voices appear to be evaluated according to gender norms that are updated based on perceptual experience as well as conceptual knowledge.

Affective Responses Mediate the Body Language of Penalty Taker - Decision-Making Relationship from Soccer Goalkeepers.

Purpose: Previous studies have shown that penalty-takers' body language affects the impressions that goalkeepers form about them and their anticipation performance. This research aimed to replicate these results and test the mediating effect of threat/challenge responses on the relationship between impression formation and the quality of goalkeeper decision-making. Methods and Results: We report 2 experiments. The first showed that participants (goalkeepers) form more positive impressions and have a lower expectation of success from dominant penalty-takers than submissive penalty-takers, and the second showed under pressure conditions that goalkeepers' decision-making was significantly less accurate against dominant players than against submissive players. In addition, we found that the more goalkeepers perceived the penalty-taker as competent, the more threatened they felt; conversely, the less they perceived the penalty-taker as competent, the more challenged they felt. Conclusion: Finally, our analysis showed that participants' cognitive appraisal (challenge vs. threat) influenced the quality of their decision-making and played a partial mediating role in the relationship between impression formation and decision-making.

Women exaggerate, men downplay: Gendered endorsement of emotional dramatization stereotypes contributes to gender bias in pain expectations.

The current work tested whether perceivers believe that women, relative to men, are likely to exaggerate versus downplay pain, an effect we refer to as the gender-pain exaggeration bias. The gender-pain exaggeration bias was operationalized as the extent to which perceivers believe women, relative to men, claim more pain than they feel. Across four experiments, we found that women were expected to exaggerate pain more than men and men were expected to downplay pain more than women (Studies 1-4). Further, judgments that women were more emotionally dramatizing than men contributed to this gender-pain exaggeration bias (Studies 2 and 4). We also assessed whether perceiver-level differences in endorsement of gendered emotional dramatization stereotypes (Studies 3-4) moderated this gender-pain exaggeration bias and found that endorsement of gendered emotional dramatization stereotypes moderated this bias. In sum, we document a relative gender-pain exaggeration bias wherein perceivers believe women, relative to men, to be emotionally dramatizing and therefore more likely to exaggerate versus downplay their pain. This bias may lead perceivers to interpret women's, relative to men's, pain reports as overstatements, inauthentic, or dramatized. Thus, the current work may have implications for well-documented biases in perceptions of (i.e., underestimating) and responses to (i.e., undertreating) women's pain.

Systematic manipulation of experimenters' non-verbal behaviors for the investigation of pain reports and placebo effects.

Objective: Non-verbal behaviors (NBs) of caregivers affect pain reports and placebo effects. However, little experimental research has systematically examined the caregivers' NBs. This study protocol and preparatory study report a systematic manipulation of experimenters' NBs to investigate pain report and placebo effects. Methods: We propose an experiment in which videotaped experimenters (VEs) conduct a pain stimulation and a placebo treatment study. The VEs express one positively enhanced NB and keep the other NBs neutral. Participants will be randomized to either the positive facial expressions (+FE), tone of voice (+TV), body movement (+BM), or neutral NBs (i.e., neutral condition; NC) of the VEs. As a preparatory study for proof of concept, two groups of NB coders from Norway and the USA separately rated the degree of NBs (eye contact, body postures and movements, and tone of voice), and impressions of dominance and being in charge, positivity, and expressivity from each NB video. The NB videos had construct validity and reliability. The +BM and +FE were rated as more dominant and in charge than the +TV and the NC. The +FE and +BM were rated as the most positive and expressive NBs, respectively. Expected results: +FE will have the largest placebo effects on pain and stress levels. However, transmitting the NBs to patients by VEs is challenging. Moreover, controlling for the effects of research assistants present in the testing room is challenging. Discussion: We propose that caregivers' NBs affect pain reports and placebo effects. Moreover, different NBs elicit different impressions, and a better understanding of the role of caregiver NBs requires more rigorous investigations. Lastly, aiming to investigate the caregiver NBs, the varying degrees of micro-NBs and their effects on the formation of impressions should be considered.

The influence of consonant wanderings and facial expressions in warmth and competence judgments.

ABSTRACTThe preference for usernames whose oral pronunciation implies inward wandering articulatory movements over those involving outward movements - the in-out effect - has been shown to shape person perception judgments. Across three studies, we further tested the boundary conditions to this effect by combining the manipulation of the articulation direction of mock online usernames with one of the most critical cues for interpersonal judgments - facial expressions. As expected, users displaying smiling faces were rated as warmer and more competent than those displaying angry expressions. Notably, even in the presence of such diagnostic cues for social judgment, the articulatory activity involved in pronouncing a person's name still affected the impressions formed, particularly in the warmth dimension. These results show that the in-out effect did not vanish even when highly diagnostic visual information was available. Overall, the current work further emphasises the role of sensorimotor experience in person perception while providing additional evidence for the in-out effect, its boundary conditions, and potential mechanisms.

Give Me a Straight Answer: Response Ambiguity Diminishes Likability.

Across nine experiments (eight preregistered) involving Western and Asian samples, we showed that people providing ambiguous (vs. specific) responses to questions in various social scenarios are seen as less likable. This is because, depending on the social context, response ambiguity may be interpreted as a way to conceal the truth and as a sign of social disinterest. Consequently, people reported lower inclination to befriend or date individuals who appeared to provide ambiguous responses. We also identified situations in which response ambiguity does not harm likability, such as when the questions are sensitive and the responder may need to "soften the blow." A final exploratory study showed that response ambiguity also impacts personality perceptions-individuals providing ambiguous responses are judged as less warm, less extraverted, less gullible, and more cautious. We discuss theoretical implications for the language psychology and person perception literatures and practical implications for impression management and formation.

The organizational principles of impression formation.

Trait impressions about others are a fundamental tool to navigate the rich social environment and yet a unitary model of its organizational principles is still lacking. The statistical properties of impression formation observed in previous studies are akin to processes that govern information encoding and storage in memory, suggesting similar cognitive and computational mechanisms. Here, in 2,780 participants, impression formation has been formalized with a computational model representing three organizational principles of memory (temporal, semantic and valence-related). The model specifically captured two main patterns of impression formation: (1) a negative valence effect that makes negative impressions loom longer than positive ones; (2) an interaction effect between the temporal and valence content that endorses more negative impressions when negative information is met first. This work shows that mechanisms of information encoding, storage and retrieval interact in ways that explain biased impression formation about social partners, thereby providing quantitative evidence for those mechanisms in individuals' impressions of others' social qualities. We discuss the implications of these results for social impressions in different, real-world contexts, and suggest how the proposed model might be extended to capture other kinds of effects, from negativity bias and pessimism to social discrimination.

Evidence for a memory advantage for prosocial behaviors.

INTRODUCTION: Prior work in the memory domain has shown that certain social information is especially well-remembered such as information for social targets who cheat. Less work, however, has investigated the extent people remember information for social targets who engage in prosocial behaviors (e.g., helping) in social interactions. The current investigation examines whether there is a memory advantage for social targets who perform prosocial behaviors. METHODS: Across two experiments, participants formed impressions of social targets engaging in prosocial and non-prosocial behaviors. Participants were then tested on their memory for the impression as well as the specific behavior each social target performed. RESULTS: Results of Experiment 1 showed that memory for impressions was better for social targets engaging in prosocial compared to non-prosocial behaviors. Results of Experiment 2 showed marginally better behavior memory for targets performing prosocial compared to non-prosocial behaviors. CONCLUSION: Overall, results of both experiments provide converging evidence of a prosocial advantage in memory, which suggests that people are attuned to prosocial behaviors exhibited by others in the social domain.

Should I post? The relationships among social media use, emotion recognition, and mental health.

Introduction: While increased time spent on social media can be negatively related to one's overall mental health, social media research often fails to account for what behaviors users are actually engaging in while they are online. The present research helps to address this gap by measuring participants' active and passive social media behavioral styles and investigates whether and how these two social media behavioral styles are related to depression, anxiety, and stress, and the mediating role of emotion recognition ability in this relationship. Methods: A pre-study (N = 128) tested whether various social media behaviors reliably grouped into active and passive behavioral styles, and a main study (N = 139) tested the relationships between social media use style, emotion recognition, and mental health. Results: While we did not find evidence of a mediating relationship between these variables, results supported that more active social media use was related to more severe anxiety and stress as well as poorer emotion recognition skill, while passive social media use was unrelated to these outcomes. Discussion: These findings highlight that, beyond objective time spent on social media, future research must consider how users are spending their time online.

Corrigendum: Tell me where you live How the perceived entitativity of neighborhoods determines the formation of impressions about their residents.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.821786.].

Similarity to the self influences memory for social targets.

The construct of the self is important in the domain of memory research. Recent work has shown that person memory is influenced by similarity of social targets to the self. The current experiments investigate self-similarity as defined by traits and political ideology to better understand how memory for social targets is organised. Across three experiments, participants formed positive or negative impressions based on each target's picture, a trait-implying behavior (Experiments 1 & 2), and/or political ideology (conservative/liberal label in Experiment 2; political-ideological belief statements in Experiment 3) followed by a memory test. Results showed a self-similarity effect dependent on valence in Experiment 1, but not in Experiments 2 or 3 when participants processed ideological information associated with targets. These results suggest that self-similarity has an effect on memory for social targets, but that ideological information disrupts self-focused processing of others, suggesting that ideological information also has a powerful influence on what people remember about others (i.e. social targets).

Waist-to-Hip Ratio Predicts Sexual Perception and Responses to Sexual Assault Disclosures.

The current work investigates the effects of target of perception's waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) on perceivers' judgments of sexual unrestrictedness and sexual victimization prototypicality. Studies 1a and 1b found that women with lower WHRs were perceived as relatively more sexually unrestricted. Studies 2a and 2b found that women with lower WHRs were perceived as relatively more prototypic of sexual victimization. Study 3 built on these findings to consider implications for responses to sexual assault disclosures. Perceivers disbelieved and minimized a disclosure of assault relatively more when made by a woman with a higher WHR. In sum, this body of work implicates WHR as a body cue that can inform consequential sexual perception. Thereby, this work identifies factors that could influence judgments of credibility of sexual violence reports, which may have implications for hesitancy to report sexual violence.

Constructing complex social categories under uncertainty.

Conceptual combination is the act of building complex concepts from simpler ones. Although research has examined how inferences about compound objects (e.g., fuzzy chair) are produced from their constituent concepts, little is known about the combinatorial processes that produce inferences about compound social categories (e.g., Irish musician). Using a computational approach, we investigated the relationship between ratings of 25 nationality-occupation combinations and ratings of their constituent concepts along the attribute dimensions of warmth and competence. We found that people incorporate uncertainty into their perceptions of compound social categories. Further, people are more likely to use a linear combination strategy when they are more certain about the attributes of the constituents and less familiar with the combination. Conversely, when social combinations are more familiar, their judged attributes deviate further from the predictions of a combinatorial model and are shared across participants, suggesting that stereotype-based knowledge plays a central role in the representation of complex social groups. Twenty-five non-human animal combinations (e.g., circus snake) serve as a comparison and were rated on size and ferocity. We found evidence that familiarity has different effects on the strategies used to combine person concepts and animal concepts, pointing to the possible existence of both common and distinct mechanisms for constructing social and non-social categories.

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.