Face-Trait and Face-Race Cues in Adults' and Children's Social Evaluations

Abstract

When making character judgments from faces, perceivers must integrate and prioritize a myriad of information, including perceived traits (e.g., appearance of trustworthiness, submissiveness, competence) and social category membership (e.g., Afrocentric, Eurocentric appearance). Across four studies, adults (Studies 1-3) and children (5-13 years old; Study 4) made evaluations based predominantly on face-traits. Regardless of whether face pairs were White-White, Black-Black, or White-Black, participants selected the trustworthy, submissive, or competent-appearing face as "nice." Further, although face-traits were used at all ages, face-race cues were used only by older children and adults, in line with correction for race bias. Indeed, adults' use of face-race cues decreased when motivation or ability to control race bias was reduced through time constraints or indirect responding. These findings reveal the processes underlying the prioritization of face-trait over face-race cues and provide the first developmental examination of how perceivers integrate such cues in explicit character evaluations.

Children use targets’ facial appearance to guide and predict social behavior.

“…However, given the current evidence that children use face-trait information in behavior judgments only after age 5, it is possible that such prioritization of face-trait cues does not reflect an innate human tendency, but rather may be one that is acquired gradually after tracking the relationships between facial appearance and behaviors directed toward others. Future research could examine age-related change in the relative roles of face-trait cues over competing information, including the relatively “deeper” cues of past behavior (e.g., Hermes et al, 2015) or social group membership (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2018; Langlois & Stephan, 2006; Rennels & Langlois, 2014). Such research would provide insights into the developmental boundary conditions on the prioritization of face-trait cues in shaping social judgments.…”

Construal level mindsets modulate gender categorizations in preschool children

“…Despite their limitations, however, the results of the study provide a promising outlook on the effects of construal level on the modulation of spontaneous gender-based social categorization. Preschool children can adjust social categorization to situational demands, which could suggest that young children already possess a sophisticated information processing architecture similar to adults (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2021).…”

“…For example, a child may think of their neighbor as the nice person wearing an eccentric jacket on holiday (low level construal) or a White man (high level construal). Though both characterizations are equally valid, concrete and abstract representations serve different functions, for example, in temporal forecasting (Trope & Liberman, 2003), afford different social inferences (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2019;Landrum et al, 2016), and may lead to different behavioral reactions (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Therefore, effective social functioning-and social development by implication-requires the ability to adjust (social) abstraction levels dynamically to varying requirements.…”

“…Given that gender and ethnicity differ in perceived status (Mandalaywala et al, 2020) and naturalness (Rhodes & Gelman, 2009), one may speculate that such differences reflect that young children adjust social categorization tendencies based on perceived situational relevance of category features (Shutts et al, 2013). However, differences in ethnic compared to gender categorizations may also reflect different developmental trajectories in children's ability to use or attend to these categories, with gender encoding suspected to develop earlier (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2019;Glazier et al, 2020;Rhodes & Baron, 2019). Thus, a purely contextual interpretation of the observed variations between gender and ethnicity-based categorization tendencies remains speculative.…”

Implicit Encoding of Social Trait Perceptions: Modeling Eye-Gaze, Pupillary, and Neuronal Responses to Faces

“…This approach allows us to test whether pupillary reactions to different faces were due to lower-level visual confounds, such as skin texture, or if they could be attributed to the influence of higher-level, more abstract information from social evaluations of faces (e.g., how threatening one looks regardless of skin tone). Second, to reduce potential bias in eye movement patterns (Hills & Pake, 2013;Stelter et al, 2021) and social evaluations (Charbonneau et al, 2020;Charlesworth & Banaji, 2019) stemming from viewing other-race faces, the facial stimuli were modified to match the participants' local environment.…”