Warmth and competence in your face! Visual encoding of stereotype content

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Social Cognition
• Nonverbal Communication

Background:

• Stereotypes influence visual representations of social groups.
• The Stereotype Content Model (SCM) identifies warmth and competence as key dimensions of social perception.
• Previous research has focused on warmth biases in visual stereotypes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if competence, the second SCM dimension, is also visually encoded in stereotypes.
• To explore the independent reflection of both warmth and competence in facial representations of social groups.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a reverse correlation image classification task for visualizing stereotypes.
• Participants created typical faces for groups stereotyped as high warmth/low competence (nursery teachers) and low warmth/high competence (managers).
• Hypothesis-blind raters judged the generated facial visualizations on warmth and competence.

Main Results:

• Visualizations of nursery teachers were rated as warmer and less competent than those of managers.
• These judgments held even when controlling for ratings on the other dimension, supporting independent encoding.
• Facial cues associated with competence are visually represented in social stereotypes.

Conclusions:

• Facial cues indicating both warmth and competence are utilized in social perception.
• People non-verbally and spontaneously process social groups using both SCM dimensions.
• This research extends the understanding of visual stereotype formation beyond warmth.