Racial Prejudice Affects Representations of Facial Trustworthiness.

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Perception Science
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Facial trustworthiness judgments are crucial for social interactions.
• Racial biases can significantly impact social perception and decision-making.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between racial prejudice and the use of racially prototypical cues in judging facial trustworthiness.
• To determine how anti-Black prejudice and intergroup contact affect the perception of trustworthiness in White and Black faces.

Main Methods:

• Computational modeling of trustworthiness and White-to-Black prototypicality based on U.S. college students' face judgments.
• Analysis of synthetic White and Black-White morphed faces across four studies with varying participant numbers (N=206 to N=397).

Main Results:

• Higher anti-Black prejudice and lower intergroup contact correlated with conflating White prototypical features with trustworthiness.
• Conversely, these biases led to associating Black prototypical features with untrustworthiness.
• Untrustworthy faces modeled from pro-White participants were perceived as more Black prototypical by naive adults.

Conclusions:

• Racial biases play a significant role in shaping perceptions of facial trustworthiness.
• The findings underscore the impact of prejudice on social cognition and impression formation.
• Intergroup contact may mitigate the influence of racial biases on trustworthiness judgments.