Abstract
Previous research has shown that perceivers can accurately extract information about perceptually ambiguous group memberships from facial information alone. For example, people demonstrate above-chance accuracy in categorizing political ideology from faces. Further, they ascribe particular personality traits to faces according to political party (e.g., Republicans are dominant and mature, Democrats are likeable and trustworthy). Here, we report three studies that replicated and extended these effects. In Study 1a, we provide evidence that, in addition to showing accuracy in categorization, politically-conservative participants expressed a bias toward categorizing targets as outgroup members. In Study 1b, we replicate this relationship with a larger sample and a stimulus set consisting of faces of professional politicians. In Study 2, we find that trait ascriptions based on target political affiliation are moderated by perceiver political ideology. Specifically, although Democrats are stereotyped as more likeable and trustworthy, conservative participants rated faces that were categorized as Republicans in Study 1a as more likeable and trustworthy than faces categorized as Democrats. Thus, this paper joins a growing literature showing that it is critical to consider perceiver identity in examining perceptions of identities and traits from faces.
Highlights
People can be quite accurate at extracting a number of seemingly concealable social identities from facial information alone
Correct categorizations of Democrats were counted as hits and incorrect categorizations of Republicans were counted as false-alarms
As predicted, participants in both Studies 1a and 1b showed above-chance accuracy in categorizing target faces according to political party affiliation
Summary
People can be quite accurate at extracting a number of seemingly concealable social identities from facial information alone. As past work sampling participants from a highly politically liberal population showed a relationship between Democrats and warmth, we tested whether this is a function of the targets (i.e., warmer faces are universally more likely to be seen as Democrats) or of the perceivers (i.e., warmer faces are more likely to be seen as ingroup members for both conservatives and liberals) The latter result would be consistent with previous reports showing that voters tend to associate likeability and warmth with their favored political candidates, which tend to be those who share their political beliefs [5], [27], [28]. Consistent with reports of the polarization of political parties in the contemporary US, despite diverse self-categorizations outside of the traditional bipartisan split [31], participants’ conservatism scores were highly correlated with their categorical party affiliations for the subsets identifying as Democrats or Republicans and more broadly as any of the liberal or conservative parties: all r’s..71
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