Mechanisms of Facial Stereotyping

当人们遇到其他人时，他们很快就会从他们的脸上推断出他们的个性特征，比如他们看起来有多值得信赖或有能力。这些最初的印象是瞬间形成的，尽管它们通常不准确，但它们强烈地指导人们的行为，并预测现实世界的结果(例如，工作机会、监禁判决)。最近，研究人员已经以令人难以置信的精度绘制了驱动特定印象的特定面部特征(例如，嘴唇朝下是不可信的)，但这项工作专注于同质目标(例如，白人男性面孔)，通常忽略了性别、种族和其他群体成员。另外，研究人员早就知道，与性别、种族和其他群体成员身份相关的刻板印象强烈地偏见印象，无论面部特征扮演什么角色。这些基于群体的偏见具有深远的后果，并可能推动社会中的性别和种族差距等社会不平等现象。然而，人们对面部特征到特定印象的映射是如何跨越群体边界而变化的知之甚少，比如当遇到性别、种族或属于内部或外部群体的人时。通过研究面容刻板印象和群体刻板印象的相互作用，该项目开发了一个综合模型，说明社会判断最初是如何形成的，以及这些判断背后的神经机制。通过整合社会心理学、认知神经科学和视觉科学的见解和技术，这个项目可以帮助确定有效的干预措施，以减少有害的社会偏见。在这个项目中，显性评级、判断速度和大脑活动测量测试了人们如何认知地整合面容刻板印象和群体刻板印象，这导致他们的社会判断反映了这两个因素之间的权衡。大脑成像有助于确定这种整合过程的神经基础，并假设前颞叶的作用，前颞叶是大脑中参与存储和检索社会概念的区域。这些发现提出了新的理论视角，即动态的、而不是固定的认知和神经结构，用于形成对他人的印象，这种印象因环境、判断对象和被判断对象的不同而不同，而且对社会学习和经验很敏感。容貌刻板印象在许多领域(如法律、商业、社会)决定了现实世界的结果，而群体刻板印象助长了各种社会不平等。该项目的总体目标是准确了解特定的面部外观，以及学习到的关于性别、种族或内部和外部群体成员的刻板印象如何使人们的行为偏向他人。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

When people encounter others, they quickly infer personality traits from their faces such as how trustworthy or competent they appear to be. These initial impressions are formed instantaneously, and although they are typically inaccurate, they strongly guide people's behavior and predict real-world outcomes (e.g., job offers, prison sentences). Recently, researchers have mapped specific facial features that drive particular impressions (e.g., downward-turned lips are untrustworthy) with incredible precision, but this work has focused on homogenous targets (e.g., White male faces) and generally ignored gender, race, and other group memberships. Separately, researchers have long known that stereotypes related to gender, race, and other group memberships strongly bias impressions regardless of any role of facial features. These group-based biases have profound consequences and can drive social inequities such as gender and racial disparities in society. However, little is known about how people’s mappings of facial features to specific impressions change across group boundaries, such as when encountering individuals who vary in gender, race, or are members of an ingroup or an outgroup. By examining the mutual roles of both facial appearance stereotypes and group stereotypes, this project develops an integrated model of how social judgments are initially formed and the neural mechanisms underlying these judgments. By integrating insights and techniques from across social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and vision science, this project can help identify effective interventions to reduce harmful social biases.In this project, explicit ratings, speed of judgment, and brain activity measures test how people cognitively integrate facial appearance stereotypes and group stereotypes, which results in their social judgments reflecting trade-offs between the two factors. Brain imaging helps identify the neural basis of this integration process with a hypothesized role of the anterior temporal lobe, a region of the brain involved in storing and retrieving social concepts. These findings advance new theoretical perspectives of a dynamic, rather than fixed, cognitive and neural architecture for forming impressions of others that varies by context, who is judging and who is being judged, and it is sensitive to social learning and experience. Facial appearance stereotypes determine real-world outcomes in many domains (e.g., legal, business, social), and group stereotypes foster a variety of societal inequities. The overarching goal of this project is to develop a precise understanding of how specific facial appearances, together with learned stereotypes about gender, race, or ingroup and outgroup membership, bias people’s behavior toward others.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.