Mechanisms of Facial Stereotyping

当人们遇到其他人时，他们会很快从他们的脸上推断出性格特征，比如他们看起来有多值得信赖或有多能干。这些最初的印象是瞬间形成的，尽管它们通常是不准确的，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）。最近，研究人员绘制了驱动特定印象的特定面部特征（例如，向下翻转的嘴唇是不可信的），但是这项工作集中在同质目标（例如，白色男性面孔），通常忽略性别、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有关的刻板印象会强烈地影响印象，而不管面部特征的作用如何。这些基于群体的偏见会产生深远的后果，并可能导致社会不平等，如社会中的性别和种族差异。然而，人们对面部特征与特定印象的映射如何在群体边界上发生变化的了解甚少，例如当遇到性别、种族不同的个体时，或者是内群体或外群体的成员时。通过研究面部外观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。通过整合来自社会心理学、认知神经科学和视觉科学的见解和技术，该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。在该项目中，外显评级、判断速度和大脑活动测量测试人们如何认知地整合面部外观刻板印象和群体刻板印象，从而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，这是一个涉及存储和检索社会概念的大脑区域。这些发现推进了一个动态的，而不是固定的，认知和神经结构的新的理论观点，形成他人的印象，不同的背景下，谁是判断，谁是被判断，它是敏感的社会学习和经验。面部外观刻板印象在许多领域（例如，法律的、商业的、社会的）和群体的陈规定型观念助长了各种社会不平等。该项目的首要目标是准确了解特定的面部外观，以及有关性别，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，并被认为值得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来支持。

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.