The Development of Character Judgments from Faces
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The Development of Character Judgments From Faces The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Cogsdill, Emily. 2015. The Development of Character Judgments From Faces. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17463958 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Development of Character Judgments from Faces A dissertation presented by Emily Cogsdill to the Department of Psychology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Psychology Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts February 2015 © 2015 Emily Cogsdill All rights reserved. Dissertation Adviser: Professor Mahzarin Banaji Emily Cogsdill Dissertation Adviser: Professor Elizabeth Spelke The Development of Character Judgments from Faces ABSTRACT First impressions play a central role in human social interaction. In particular, the face is a rich source of information that perceivers use in making both initial and lasting character judgments. Despite the large and growing body of work demonstrating that these judgments affect outcomes in domains as crucial as elections and criminal sentencing, little remains known about the ontogenetic origins of this consequential aspect of human social cognition. The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a set of early investigations into the development of face-to-trait inferences. Paper 1 demonstrates that, like adults, even children as young as 3-4 years of age provide consistent trait judgments when asked to judge two-dimensional computer-generated face images, suggesting that this general ability is so fundamental as to emerge strongly at the earliest ages tested. Paper 2 shows that this propensity is so deeply ingrained at an early age that similar consensus across the lifespan emerges in response to static faces belonging to adults, children, and even rhesus macaques. Paper 3 investigates the potential consequences of these judgments, showing that face-based character assessments influence attributions of trait-relevant behaviors and even cause children to modulate their own behaviors towards others. The findings of this dissertation clearly illustrate that face-to-trait inference emerges early in development, and is therefore a fundamental element of human social cognition with important consequences throughout the lifespan. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 1 Faces as a cue to personality ............................................................................................ 5 Development .................................................................................................................... 7 Overview of dissertation ................................................................................................ 12 A note on accuracy ........................................................................................................ 14 PAPER I: Inferring character from faces: A developmental study ................................... 17 Abstract .......................................................................................................................... 17 Experiment 1 .................................................................................................................. 21 Experiment 2 .................................................................................................................. 25 General Discussion ........................................................................................................ 29 PAPER II: Face-trait inferences show robust child-adult agreement: Evidence from three types of faces ..................................................................................................................... 31 Abstract .......................................................................................................................... 31 Experiment 1 .................................................................................................................. 35 Experiment 2 .................................................................................................................. 47 General Discussion ........................................................................................................ 54 PAPER III: Children modulate their behavioral attributions and manifest behaviors based on the facial appearance of others ..................................................................................... 58 Abstract .......................................................................................................................... 58 Experiment 1: From Trait Inferences to Behavior Attributions .................................... 62 Experiments 2-5: Face-Based Modulation of Prosocial Behaviors ............................... 81 Experiment 2 .............................................................................................................. 84 Experiment 3 .............................................................................................................. 88 Experiment 4 .............................................................................................................. 92 Experiment 5 .............................................................................................................. 95 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 104 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................ 114 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For advice and assistance in preparing this dissertation, I thank the members of my committee: Mahzarin Banaji, Elizabeth Spelke, Ken Nakayama, and Max Krasnow. For their financial support of this work, I thank Harvard University, the American Psychological Foundation, the E. J. Safra Center for the Study of Ethics, the Santa Fe Institute, and the National Institutes of Health. For their assistance discussing ideas, reviewing manuscripts, and enduring hours of watching me talk and gesticulate wildly at pictures of faces and bar graphs, I thank my colleagues in the Implicit Social Cognition Laboratory and the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. For their elbow grease and relentlessly positive attitudes, I thank the research assistants with whom I have been fortunate to work these past three years: Amelia Clark, Sarah Coughlon, Ann Finkel, Judy Jiao, Neela Kaushik, Bryan LeBlanc, Carol Meuth, and Elyse Neubauer. For their shared mischief and endless moral support, I thank my dear friends. For their unconditional love and encouragement, I thank my family. Finally, for her wisdom, grit, and unfailing mentorship, I thank Mahzarin Banaji. v INTRODUCTION Humans are profoundly social creatures. First impressions play a critical role in social interaction, and perceivers readily use appearance cues to inform judgments of personality traits (e.g., Hassin & Trope, 2000; Zebrowitz, 1997; Zebrowitz & Montepare, 2005). Most fundamentally, such judgments inform our inclinations to approach or avoid others (Todorov, 2008), and from an evolutionary standpoint it stands to reason that humans would have developed perceptual systems to aid in survival by determining helpful collaborators or dangerous threats in the environment. Whatever their phylogenetic origin, these appearance-based first impressions persist in the modern world. Advances in psychological research methods have further demonstrated that character judgments in response to facial appearances emerge spontaneously (Todorov & Uleman, 2002, 2003) and rapidly (e.g., Bar et al. 2006), with even as little as 33 milliseconds of exposure to masked images being sufficient to elicit trait judgments (Todorov et al., 2009). Moreover, these judgments remain relatively unchanged even with unlimited exposure to faces (Ballew & Todorov, 2007). First impressions are thus at the heart of the perpetual challenge of understanding one another (Gilbert, 1998), an edeavor that is essential to cooperating and functioning in modern society. It is therefore appropriate that decades of psychological research, and much of the field of social psychology in general, has focused on studying and articulating the processes that guide this quest for mutual understanding. Modern research makes extensive use of sophisticated techniques like neuroimaging and data-driven statistical models to understand how appearances create our perceptions of one another. The origins of such work can be traced back to such influential researchers as Asch (1946) and Heider (1958), whose experiments and theories in the mid-20th century fueled a broad 2 interest in understanding how humans generate causal attributions to understand each others’ behavior in everyday life – i.e., how they form impressions of one another. This conception of social reasoning as an extension of basic causal reasoning inspired a long tradition of research on person