Social attributions from faces bias human choices

Paladyn, Journal of Behavioral Robotics

We explore the impressions and conceptualisations produced by participants after their first encounter with the teleoperated robot, Telenoid R1. Participants were invited to freely report the first three words that came to mind after seeing the robot. Here we triangulate (i) three-word data from an online survey (n=340) where respondents saw a brief video of the Telenoid with (ii) three-word data from an interaction study where participants interacted with a physically present Telenoid (n=75) and, (iii) data from qualitative interviews (n=7) with participants who had engaged with the Telenoid. Data were subjected to sentiment analysis, linguistic analysis and regression analysis. Ranking of the most frequently produced words in the two groups revealed an overlap on the top-10 produced words (6 out of 10 words). Sentiment analysis and regression revealed an association between negative predicates and the online condition. Sentiments were not convincingly associated with age or gender...

Behavior Research Methods

Some of the ‘best practice’ approaches to ensuring reproducibility of research can be difficult to implement in the developmental and clinical domains, where sample sizes and session lengths are constrained by the practicalities of recruitment and testing. For this reason, an important area of improvement to target is the reliability of measurement. Here we demonstrate that best–worst scaling (BWS) provides a superior alternative to Likert ratings for measuring children’s subjective impressions. Seventy-three children aged 5–6 years rated the trustworthiness of faces using either Likert ratings or BWS over two sessions. Individual children’s ratings in the BWS condition were significantly more consistent from session 1 to session 2 than those in the Likert condition, a finding we also replicate with a large adult sample (N = 72). BWS also produced more reliable ratings at the group level than Likert ratings in the child sample. These findings indicate that BWS is a developmentally a...

Ciencia Política

Este artículo evalúa el efecto de las expresiones faciales de los candidatos políticos en las percepciones de confianza y capacidad de gobernar que tienen los votantes. Se condujo un diseño experimental intra-sujeto (cuatro candidatos) y entre grupos (expresión facial: sonriente/neutral). Los participantes evaluaron la confianza percibida y la capacidad para gobernar después de mirar la imagen de cada candidato (sonriente o neutral). Los resultados muestran que una cara sonriente incrementa la confianza percibida y capacidad para gobernar. Adicionalmente, la confianza percibida media completamente la relación entre expresiones faciales y la capacidad para gobernar. Así, una expresión facial sonriente (frente a una neutral) influencia la confianza de los votantes, lo que a su vez impacta directamente la capacidad para gobernar. En términos teóricos y prácticos, se discuten herramientas que pueden ayudar a fortalecer el involucramiento de la ciudadanía en los procesos democráticos com...

European Journal of Management and Business Economics

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine, among the possible causes, whether trust in the leader is one of the most relevant factors on the success of a virtual work team by analyzing different antecedents of the trust and its consequences. Design/methodology/approach The influence that certain physical and behavioral characteristics of the leader (attractiveness, empathy and justice) exert on the degree of trust is evaluated. On the other hand, the influence of trust on the efficiency of the team, in terms of organizational citizenship behavior and commitment, is analyzed. To test the model, a survey was conducted on real work teams and the data were analyzed through a model of structural equations. Findings The results support the hypotheses and consequently, the relevance of trust in the leader. Specifically, the leader’s physical and behavioral characteristics have a significant effect on the trust in the leader. This trust results in greater organizational efficiency. Or...

PLoS ONE, 2020

In our experiment, we tested how exposure to a mock televised news segment, with a systematically manipulated emotional valence of voiceover, images and TV tickers (in the updating format) impacts viewers’ perception. Subjects (N = 603) watched specially prepared professional video material which portrayed the story of a candidate for local mayor. Following exposure to the video, subjects assessed the politician in terms of competence, sociability, and morality. Results showed that positive images improved the assessment of the politician, whereas negative images lowered it. In addition, unexpectedly, positive tickers led to a negative assessment, and negative ones led to more beneficial assessments. However, in a situation of inconsistency between the voiceover and information provided on visual add-ons, additional elements are apparently ignored, especially when they are negative and the narrative is positive. We then discuss the implications of these findings.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

First impressions formed after seeing someone’s face or hearing their voice can affect many social decisions, including voting in political elections. Despite the many studies investigating the independent contribution of face and voice cues to electoral success, their integration is still not well understood. Here, we examine a novel electoral context, student representative ballots, allowing us to test the generalizability of previous studies. We also examine the independent contributions of visual, auditory, and audiovisual information to social judgments of the candidates, and their relationship to election outcomes. Results showed that perceived trustworthiness was the only trait significantly related to election success. These findings contrast with previous reports on the importance of perceived competence using audio or visual cues only in the context of national political elections. The present study highlights the role of real-world context and emphasizes the importance of...

Assessment, 2018

The Continuous Assessment of Interpersonal Dynamics (CAID) is a method in which trained observers continuously code the dominance and warmth of individuals who interact with one another in dyads. This method has significant promise for assessing dynamic interpersonal processes. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of individual sex, dyadic familiarity, and situational conflict on patterns of interpersonal warmth, dominance, and complementarity as assessed via CAID. We used six samples with 603 dyads, including two samples of unacquainted mixed-sex undergraduates interacting in a collaborative task, two samples of couples interacting in both collaborative and conflict tasks, and two samples of mothers and children interacting in both collaborative and conflict tasks. Complementarity effects were robust across all samples, and individuals tended to be relatively warm and dominant. Results from multilevel models indicated that women were slightly warmer than men, whereas...

Journal of sex research, 2015

In the present work, we investigated the pop cultural idea that people have a sixth sense, called "gaydar," to detect who is gay. We propose that "gaydar" is an alternate label for using stereotypes to infer orientation (e.g., inferring that fashionable men are gay). Another account, however, argues that people possess a facial perception process that enables them to identify sexual orientation from facial structure. We report five experiments testing these accounts. Participants made gay-or-straight judgments about fictional targets that were constructed using experimentally manipulated stereotypic cues and real gay/straight people's face cues. These studies revealed that orientation is not visible from the face-purportedly "face-based" gaydar arises from a third-variable confound. People do, however, readily infer orientation from stereotypic attributes (e.g., fashion, career). Furthermore, the folk concept of gaydar serves as a legitimizing myth:...

PLOS ONE, 2019

This study examined how trustworthiness impressions depend on vocal expressive and person characteristics and how their dependence may be explained by acoustical profiles. Sentences spoken in a range of emotional and conversational expressions by 20 speakers differing in age and sex were presented to 80 age and sex matched listeners who rated speaker trustworthiness. Positive speaker valence but not arousal consistently predicted greater perceived trustworthiness. Additionally, voices from younger as compared with older and female as compared with male speakers were judged more trustworthy. Acoustic analysis highlighted several parameters as relevant for differentiating trustworthiness ratings and showed that effects largely overlapped with those for speaker valence and age, but not sex. Specifically, a fast speech rate, a low harmonic-to-noise ratio, and a low fundamental frequency mean and standard deviation differentiated trustworthy from untrustworthy, positive from negative, and younger from older voices. Male and female voices differed in other ways. Together, these results show that a speaker's expressive as well as person characteristics shape trustworthiness impressions and that their effect likely results from a combination of low-level perceptual and higher-order conceptual processes.

Scientific Reports

There is growing concern that artificial intelligence conversational agents (e.g., Siri, Alexa) reinforce voice-based social stereotypes. Because little is known about social perceptions of conversational agents’ voices, we investigated (1) the dimensions that underpin perceptions of these synthetic voices and (2) the role that acoustic parameters play in these perceptions. Study 1 (N = 504) found that perceptions of synthetic voices are underpinned by Valence and Dominance components similar to those previously reported for natural human stimuli and that the Dominance component was strongly and negatively related to voice pitch. Study 2 (N = 160) found that experimentally manipulating pitch in synthetic voices directly influenced dominance-related, but not valence-related, perceptions. Collectively, these results suggest that greater consideration of the role that voice pitch plays in dominance-related perceptions when designing conversational agents may be an effective method for ...

Scientific Reports

The affective polarization characteristic of the United States’ political climate contributes to pervasive intergroup tension. This tension polarizes basic aspects of person perception, such as face impressions. For instance, face impressions are polarized by partisanship disclosure such that people form positive and negative impressions of, respectively, shared and opposing partisan faces. How partisanship interacts with other facial cues affecting impressions remains unclear. Building on work showing that facial trustworthiness, a core dimension of face perception, is especially salient for ingroup members, we reasoned that shared and opposing partisanship may also affect the relation between facial trustworthiness characteristics and subsequent likability impressions. A stronger positive relation emerged for shared versus opposing partisan faces across more conservative and liberal perceivers (Experiments 1 and 2). Exploratory analyses showed that this difference links to perceiv...

Educational Psychologist, 2016

We summarize the argumentative theory of reasoning, which claims that the main function of reasoning is to argue. In this theory, argumentation is seen as being essentially cooperative (people have to listen to others' arguments and be ready to change their mind) but with an adversarial dimension (their goal as argument producers is to convince). Consistent with this theory, the experimental literature shows that solitary reasoning is biased and lazy, whereas reasoning in group discussion produces good results, provided some conditions are met. We formulate recommendations for improving reasoning performance, mainly, to make people argue more and better by creating felicitous conditions for group discussion. We also make some suggestions for improving solitary reasoning, in particular to maximize students' exposure to arguments challenging their positions. Teaching people about the value of argumentation is likely to improve not only immediate reasoning performance but also long-term solitary reasoning skills.

Current Psychology, 2022

While ample evidence supports an association between power and dominance, little is still known about how temporary experiences of power influence the way people come to see themselves and others. The present research investigates the effect of social power on self- and other-face recognition, and examines whether gender modulates the direction of this effect. Male and female participants were induced to feel either powerful or powerless and had to recognize their own face and those of same-sex strangers from a series of images ranging from a dominant to a submissive version of the original. Results showed that males more frequently chose a dominant self-image under high power, whereas females selected a submissive self-image under low power. When presented with faces of same-sex targets female participants relied on low-power features (i.e., submissiveness) of the self in the perception of others (assimilation effect), whereas male participants more often selected a dominant image ...

Cognition and Emotion, 2016

Running header: PERCEIVED CRIMINALITY AND REMORSE Word Count: 6322 main text Draft version: August, 26 th , 2016. This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in Cognition and Emotion. It is not the copy of record. To be cited as: Funk, F., Walker, M., & Todorov, A. (in press). Modelling perceptions of criminality and remorse from faces using a data-driven computational approach, Cognition and Emotion.

2018

Face processing plays a central role in human social life. Humans readily infer social traits (e.g. attractiveness and trustworthiness) from a stranger's face. Previous attempts to characterize the facial (physiognomic) features underlying social processing have lacked either systematicity or interpretability. Here, we utilize a statistical framework to tackle this problem, by learning a vector space to represent faces, and a linear mapping from this face space into human social trait judgments. Specifically, we obtain a face space by training the Active Appearance Model on large datasets of face images. Based on human evaluations of numerous social traits on these images, we then use regression to find linear combinations of facial features (what we call Linear Trait Axis, or LTA) that best predict human social judgments. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in overall predictive accuracy -comparable to the best convolutional neural network and better than human prediction of other human ratings. To interpret the LTAs, we regress them against a large repertoire of geometric features. To understand the relationship between the facial features that underlie different social, emotional, and demographic traits, we present a novel "dual space analysis" that characterizes the geometric relationship among LTA vectors. It shows that facial features important for social trait perception are largely distinct from those underlying demographic and emotion perception, contrary to previous suggestions that social trait perception is driven by over-generalization of relatively primitive demographic and emotion perception processes. In addition, we present a novel correlation decomposition analysis that quantifies how correlations in trait judgments (e.g. between attractiveness and babyfacedness) independently arise from (1) shared facial features among traits, and (2) correlation in the distribution of facial features in the human population.