Abstract
In two studies we disentangled and systematically investigated the impact of subtle facial cues to masculinity/femininity and gender category information on first impressions. Participants judged the same unambiguously male and female target persons–either with masculine or feminine facial features slightly enhanced–regarding stereotypically masculine (i.e., competence) and feminine (i.e., warmth) personality traits. Results of both studies showed a strong effect of facial masculinity/femininity: Masculine-looking persons were seen as colder and more competent than feminine-looking persons. This effect of facial masculinity/femininity was not only found for typical (i.e., masculine-looking men and feminine-looking women) and atypical (i.e., masculine-looking women and feminine-looking men) category members; it was even found to be more pronounced for atypical than for typical category members. This finding reveals that comparing atypical members to the group prototype results in pronounced effects of facial masculinity/femininity. These contrast effects for atypical members predominate assimilation effects for typical members. Intriguingly, very subtle facial cues to masculinity/femininity strongly guide first impressions and may have more impact than the gender category.
Highlights
When we see a person for the very first time, we instantly and spontaneously draw inferences from that person’s face
To test Hypothesis 1 we used the lme4 [44] package in R [45] to fit a mixed linear model with the following specifications to our data: Facial appearance, target gender, personality dimension, all three possible 2-way interactions, and the three-way interaction were included into the model as fixed effects, while both participants and faces were included as random effects
We included a random intercept and a random slope for the main effect facial appearance based on participants and a random intercept and random slopes for facial appearance, personality dimension, and the facial appearance x personality dimension interaction based on faces
Summary
When we see a person for the very first time, we instantly and spontaneously draw inferences from that person’s face These inferences pertain to the person’s group memberships or social category (e.g., [1]) as well as to their personality (e.g., [2]). A feminine-looking woman, for example, is more categorized as a woman [3,4], she is more likely perceived as warm–a stereotypical female trait–than a masculine-looking woman [8]. Both inferences are related to processes of stereotyping. On the one hand, classifying a person as female activates consensual beliefs about the characteristics of women (e.g., women are warm [9]), which might lead to the ascription of the personality traits perceived as stereotypic
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