Perceiver and target partisanship shift facial trustworthiness effects on likability

Abstract

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 perceived partisan threat (Experiment 1) and that experimentally manipulating inter-party threat strengthened opposing partisan derogation and shared partisan enhancement patterns (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that partisanship extends from affecting overall face impressions of partisans to affecting the relation between a core dimension of face perception and subsequent impressions. These findings highlight the prevalence of partisanship effects in basic aspects of person perception and have implications for intergroup behavior.