Trait knowledge forms a common structure across social cognition

Distance and grid-like codes support the navigation of abstract social space in the human brain

People form impressions about others during daily social encounters and infer personality traits from others' behaviors. Such trait inference is thought to rely on two universal dimensions: competence and warmth. These two dimensions can be used to construct a 'social cognitive map' organizing massive information obtained from social encounters efficiently. Originating from spatial cognition, the neural codes supporting the representation and navigation of spatial cognitive maps have been widely studied. Recent studies suggest similar neural mechanism subserves the map-like architecture in social cognition as well. Here we investigated how spatial codes operate beyond the physical environment and support the representation and navigation of social cognitive map. We designed a social value space defined by two dimensions of competence and warmth. Behaviorally, participants were able to navigate to a learned location from random starting locations in this abstract social space. At the neural level, we identified the representation of distance in the precuneus, fusiform gyrus, and middle occipital gyrus. We also found partial evidence of grid-like representation patterns in the medial prefrontal cortex and entorhinal cortex. Moreover, the intensity of grid-like response scaled with the performance of navigating in social space and social avoidance trait scores. Our findings suggest a neurocognitive mechanism by which social information can be organized into a structured representation, namely cognitive map and its relevance to social well-being.

Simplifying social learning

Social learning is complex, but people often seem to navigate social environments with ease. This ability creates a puzzle for traditional accounts of reinforcement learning (RL) that assume people negotiate a tradeoff between easy-but-simple behavior (model-free learning) and complex-but-difficult behavior (e.g., model-based learning). We offer a theoretical framework for resolving this puzzle: although social environments are complex, people have social expertise that helps them behave flexibly with low cognitive cost. Specifically, by using familiar concepts instead of focusing on novel details, people can turn hard learning problems into simpler ones. This ability highlights social learning as a prototype for studying cognitive simplicity in the face of environmental complexity and identifies a role for conceptual knowledge in everyday reward learning.

The many faces of compensation: The similarities and differences between social and facial models of perception

Previous research shows that stereotypes can distort the visual representation of groups in a top-down fashion. In the present endeavor, we tested if the compensation effect-the negative relationship that emerges between the social dimensions of warmth and competence when judging two social targets-would bias the visual representations of these targets in a compensatory way. We captured participants' near spontaneous facial prototypes of social targets by means of an unconstrained technique, namely the reverse correlation. We relied on a large multi-phase study (N = 869) and found that the expectations of the facial content of two novel groups that differed on one of the two social dimensions are biased in a compensatory manner on the facial dimensions of trustworthiness, warmth, and dominance but not competence. The present research opens new avenues by showing that compensation not only manifests itself on abstract ratings but that it also orients the visual representations of social targets.

Give Me a Straight Answer: Response Ambiguity Diminishes Likability

Across nine experiments (eight preregistered) involving Western and Asian samples, we showed that people providing ambiguous (vs. specific) responses to questions in various social scenarios are seen as less likable. This is because, depending on the social context, response ambiguity may be interpreted as a way to conceal the truth and as a sign of social disinterest. Consequently, people reported lower inclination to befriend or date individuals who appeared to provide ambiguous responses. We also identified situations in which response ambiguity does not harm likability, such as when the questions are sensitive and the responder may need to "soften the blow." A final exploratory study showed that response ambiguity also impacts personality perceptions-individuals providing ambiguous responses are judged as less warm, less extraverted, less gullible, and more cautious. We discuss theoretical implications for the language psychology and person perception literatures and practical implications for impression management and formation.

Trustworthiness judgments without the halo effect: A data-driven computational modeling approach

Trustworthy-looking faces are also perceived as more attractive, but are there other meaningful cues that contribute to perceived trustworthiness? Using data-driven models, we identify these cues after removing attractiveness cues. In Experiment 1, we show that both judgments of trustworthiness and attractiveness of faces manipulated by a model of perceived trustworthiness change in the same direction. To control for the effect of attractiveness, we build two new models of perceived trustworthiness: a subtraction model, which forces the perceived attractiveness and trustworthiness to be negatively correlated (Experiment 2), and an orthogonal model, which reduces their correlation (Experiment 3). In both experiments, faces manipulated to appear more trustworthy were indeed perceived to be more trustworthy, but not more attractive. Importantly, in both experiments, these faces were also perceived as more approachable and with more positive expressions, as indicated by both judgments and machine learning algorithms. The current studies show that the visual cues used for trustworthiness and attractiveness judgments can be separated, and that apparent approachability and facial emotion are driving trustworthiness judgments and possibly general valence evaluation.

Uncertain threat is associated with greater impulsive actions and neural dissimilarity to Black versus White faces

Race is a social construct that contributes to group membership and heightens emotional arousal in intergroup contexts. Little is known about how emotional arousal, specifically uncertain threat, influences behavior and brain processes in response to race information. We investigated the effects of experimentally manipulated uncertain threat on impulsive actions to Black versus White faces in a community sample (n = 106) of Black and White adults. While undergoing fMRI, participants performed an emotional go/no-go task under three conditions of uncertainty: 1) anticipation of an uncertain threat (i.e., unpredictable loud aversive sound); 2) anticipation of an uncertain reward (i.e., unpredictable receipt of money); and 3) no anticipation of an uncertain event. Representational similarity analysis was used to examine the neural representations of race information across functional brain networks between conditions of uncertainty. Participants-regardless of their own race-showed greater impulsivity and neural dissimilarity in response to Black versus White faces across all functional brain networks in conditions of uncertain threat relative to other conditions. This pattern of greater neural dissimilarity under threat was enhanced in individuals with high implicit racial bias. Our results illustrate the distinct and important influence of uncertain threat on global differentiation in how race information is represented in the brain, which may contribute to racially biased behavior.

Incorporating social knowledge structures into computational models

To navigate social interactions successfully, humans need to continuously learn about the personality traits of other people (e.g., how helpful or aggressive is the other person?). However, formal models that capture the complexities of social learning processes are currently lacking. In this study, we specify and test potential strategies that humans can employ for learning about others. Standard Rescorla-Wagner (RW) learning models only capture parts of the learning process because they neglect inherent knowledge structures and omit previously acquired knowledge. We therefore formalize two social knowledge structures and implement them in hybrid RW models to test their usefulness across multiple social learning tasks. We name these concepts granularity (knowledge structures about personality traits that can be utilized at different levels of detail during learning) and reference points (previous knowledge formalized into representations of average people within a social group). In five behavioural experiments, results from model comparisons and statistical analyses indicate that participants efficiently combine the concepts of granularity and reference points-with the specific combinations in models depending on the people and traits that participants learned about. Overall, our experiments demonstrate that variants of RW algorithms, which incorporate social knowledge structures, describe crucial aspects of the dynamics at play when people interact with each other.

Personality Across World Regions Predicts Variability in the Structure of Face Impressions

Research on face impressions has often focused on a fixed, universal architecture, treating regional variability as noise. Here, we demonstrated a crucial yet neglected role of cultural learning processes in forming face impressions. In Study 1, we found that variability in the structure of adult perceivers' face impressions across 42 world regions (N = 287,178) could be explained by variability in the actual personality structure of people living in those regions. In Study 2, data from 232 world regions (N = 307,136) revealed that adult perceivers use the actual personality structure learned from their local environment to form lay beliefs about personality, and these beliefs in turn support the structure of perceivers' face impressions. Together, these results suggest that people form face impressions on the basis of a conceptual understanding of personality structure that they have come to learn from their regional environment. The findings suggest a need for greater attention to the regional and cultural specificity of face impressions.

Why Warmth Matters More Than Competence: A New Evolutionary Approach

Multiple lines of evidence suggest that there are two major dimensions of social perception, often called warmth and competence, and that warmth is prioritized over competence in multiple types of social decision-making. Existing explanations for this prioritization argue that warmth is more consequential for an observer's welfare than is competence. We present a new explanation for the prioritization of warmth based on humans' evolutionary history of cooperative partner choice. We argue that the prioritization of warmth evolved because ancestral humans faced greater variance in the warmth of potential cooperative partners than in their competence but greater variance in competence over time within cooperative relationships. These each made warmth more predictive than competence of the future benefits of a relationship, but because of differences in the distributions of these traits, not because of differences in their intrinsic consequentiality. A broad, synthetic review of the anthropological literature suggests that these conditions were characteristic of the ecologies in which human social cognition evolved, and agent-based models demonstrate the plausibility of these selection pressures. We conclude with future directions for the study of preferences and the further integration of social and evolutionary psychology.

The cultural learning account of first impressions

Humans spontaneously attribute character traits to strangers based on their facial appearance. Although these 'first impressions' typically have no basis in reality, some authors have assumed that they have an innate origin. By contrast, the Trait Inference Mapping (TIM) account proposes that first impressions are products of culturally acquired associative mappings that allow activation to spread from representations of facial appearance to representations of trait profiles. According to TIM, cultural instruments, including propaganda, illustrated storybooks, art and iconography, ritual, film, and TV, expose many individuals within a community to common sources of correlated face-trait experience, yielding first impressions that are shared by many, but typically inaccurate. Here, we review emerging empirical findings, many of which accord with TIM, and argue that future work must distinguish first impressions based on invariant facial features (e.g., shape) from those based on facial behaviours (e.g., expressions).

The formation mechanism of destructive leadership behavior: from the perspective of moral deconstruction process

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of psychological contract breach on destructive by developing a moderated mediation model. The model focuses on the mediating role of moral identity and moral disengagement and the moderating role of moral belief.

Design/methodology/approach

This study conducted a three-wave questionnaire survey and used 377 matched-sample data to test the hypotheses. PROCESS bootstrapping program in SPSS and confirmatory factor analysis in AMOS software were adopted in this study.

Findings

Results reveal that psychological contract breach has a positive effect on destructive leadership behavior, and the relationship is mediated by moral identity and moral disengagement; moral belief not only moderates the relationship between psychological contract breach and destructive leadership behavior, but also moderates the mediation effect of moral identity and moral disengagement.

Originality/value

First, this study enriches the destructive leadership behavior literature by verifying psychological contract breach as an antecedent. Second, this study discusses the role of morality in the formation mechanism of destructive leadership behavior by testing the mediating effect of moral identity and moral disengagement and the moderating effect of moral belief.

Everyday Perceiver-Context Influences on Impression Formation: No Evidence of Consistent Effects

Facial impressions (e.g., trustworthy, intelligent) vary considerably across different perceivers and targets. However, nearly all existing research comes from participants evaluating faces on a computer screen in a lab or office environment. We explored whether social perceptions could additionally be influenced by perceivers' experiential factors that vary in daily life: mood, environment, physiological state, and psychological situations. To that end, we tracked daily changes in participants' experienced contexts during impression formation using experience sampling. We found limited evidence that perceivers' contexts are an important factor in impressions. Perceiver context alone does not systematically influence trait impressions in a consistent manner-suggesting that perceiver and target idiosyncrasies are the most powerful drivers of social impressions. Overall, results suggest that perceivers' experienced contexts may play only a small role in impressions formed from faces.

Gender expansive listeners utilize a non-binary, multidimensional conception of gender to inform voice gender perception

Few studies on voice perception have attempted to address the complexity of gender perception of ambiguous voices. The current study investigated how perception of gender varies with the complexity of the listener's own gender conception and identity. We explicitly recruited participants of all genders, including those who are gender expansive (i.e. transgender and/or non-binary), and directed them to rate ambiguous synthetic voices on three independent scales of masculine, feminine, and "other" (and to select one or multiple categorical labels for them). Gender expansive listeners were more likely to use the entire expanse of the rating scales and showed systematic categorization of gender-neutral voices as non-binary. We propose this is due to repeated use of reflective processes that challenge pre-existing gender categories and the incorporation of this decision-making process into their reflexive system. Because voice gender influences speech perception, the perceptual experience of gender expansive listeners may influence perceptual flexibility in speech.

Facial Stereotyping Drives Judgments of Perceptually Ambiguous Social Groups

When seeing a face, people form judgments of perceptually ambiguous social categories (PASCs), for example, gun-owners, gay people, or alcoholics. Previous research has assumed that PASC judgments arise from the statistical learning of facial features in social encounters. We propose, instead, that perceivers associate facial features with traits (e.g., extroverted) and then infer PASC membership via learned stereotype associations with those traits. Across three studies, we show that when any PASC is more stereotypically associated with a trait (e.g., alcoholics = extroverted), perceivers are more likely to infer PASC membership from faces conveying that trait (Study 1). Furthermore, we demonstrate that individual differences in trait–PASC stereotypes predict face-based judgments of PASC membership (Study 2) and have a causal role in these judgments (Study 3). Together, our findings imply that people can form any number of PASC judgments from facial appearance alone by drawing on their learned social–conceptual associations.

Facial Impressions Are Predicted by the Structure of Group Stereotypes

Impressions of other people's faces (e.g., trustworthiness) have long been thought to be evoked by morphological variation (e.g., upturned mouth) in a universal, fixed manner. However, recent research suggests that these impressions vary considerably across perceivers and targets' social-group memberships. Across 4,247 U.S. adults recruited online, we investigated whether racial and gender stereotypes may be a critical factor underlying this variability in facial impressions. In Study 1, we found that not only did facial impressions vary by targets' gender and race, but also the structure of these impressions was associated with the structure of stereotype knowledge. Study 2 extended these findings by demonstrating that individual differences in perceivers' own unique stereotype associations predicted the structure of their own facial impressions. Together, the findings suggest that the structure of people's impressions of others' faces is driven not only by the morphological variation of the face but also by learned stereotypes about social groups.

Understanding one's character through the voice: Dimensions of personality perception from Chinese greeting word "Ni Hao"

Previous western studies revealed a two-dimensional model (valence and dominance) in voice impressions. To explore the cross-cultural validity of this model, the present study recruited Chinese participants to evaluate other people's personality from recordings of Chinese vocal greeting word "Ni Hao". Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with Varimax Rotation and Parallel Analysis was used to investigate the dimensions underlying personality judgments. The results also revealed a two-dimensional model: approachability and capability. The approachability dimension was similar to the valence dimension reported in a previous study. It indicated that the approachability/valence dimension has cross-cultural commonality. Unlike the dimension of dominance which was closely related to aggressiveness, the dimension of capability emphasized the social aspects of capability such as intellectuality, social skills, and tenacity. In addition, the acoustic parameters that were used to infer the personality of speakers, as well as the relationship between vocal attractiveness and the personality dimensions of voice, were also partially different from the findings in Western culture.

Little Between-Region and Between-Country Variance When People Form Impressions of Others

To what extent are perceivers' first impressions of other individuals dictated by cultural background rather than personal idiosyncrasies? To address this question, we analyzed a globally diverse data set containing 11,481 adult participants' ratings of 120 targets across 45 countries (2,597,624 total ratings). Across ratings of 13 traits, we found that perceivers' idiosyncratic differences accounted for approximately 29% of variance and impressions on their own and approximately 16% in conjunction with target characteristics. However, country- and region-level differences, here a proxy for culture, accounted for 3.2% on average (i.e., both alone and in conjunction with target characteristics). We replicated this pattern of effects in a preregistered analysis on an entirely novel data set containing 7,007 participants' ratings of 100 targets across 41 countries (24,886 total ratings). Together, these results suggest that perceivers' impressions of other people are largely dictated by their individual characteristics and local environment rather than their cultural background.

Mask exposure during COVID-19 changes emotional face processing

Faces are one of the key ways that we obtain social information about others. They allow people to identify individuals, understand conversational cues, and make judgements about others' mental states. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, widespread mask-wearing practices were implemented, causing a shift in the way Americans typically interact. This introduction of masks into social exchanges posed a potential challenge-how would people make these important inferences about others when a large source of information was no longer available? We conducted two studies that investigated the impact of mask exposure on emotion perception. In particular, we measured how participants used facial landmarks (visual cues) and the expressed valence and arousal (affective cues), to make similarity judgements about pairs of emotion faces. Study 1 found that in August 2020, participants with higher levels of mask exposure used cues from the eyes to a greater extent when judging emotion similarity than participants with less mask exposure. Study 2 measured participants' emotion perception in both April and September 2020 -before and after widespread mask adoption-in the same group of participants to examine changes in the use of facial cues over time. Results revealed an overall increase in the use of visual cues from April to September. Further, as mask exposure increased, people with the most social interaction showed the largest increase in the use of visual facial cues. These results provide evidence that a shift has occurred in how people process faces such that the more people are interacting with others that are wearing masks, the more they have learned to focus on visual cues from the eye area of the face.

Keeping One’s Distance: Mask Wearing is Implicitly Associated With Psychological Distance

Mask wearing plays a vital role in the fight against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Despite its ubiquity in everyday social life, it is still unknown how masked faces are mentally represented. Drawing on construal-level theory, we test the hypothesis that masked faces and unmasked faces are implicitly associated with psychological distance and proximity in memory, respectively. Four preregistered, high-powered experiments ( N = 354 adults) using the Implicit Association Test lend convergent support to this hypothesis across all four dimensions of psychological distance: social distance, spatial distance, temporal distance, and hypothetical distance. A mini meta-analysis validates the reliability of the findings (Hedge’s g = 0.46). The present work contributes to the growing literature on construal-level effects on implicit social cognition and enriches the current discussion on mask wearing in the pandemic and beyond.

Perceiver Effects in Person Perception Reflect Acquiescence, Positivity, and Trait-Specific Content: Evidence From a Large-Scale Replication Study

Person judgments reflect perceiver effects: differences in how perceivers judge the average person. The factorial structure of such effects is still discussed. We present a large-scale, preregistered replication study using over 1 million person judgments (different groups of 200 perceivers judged 200 targets in one of 20 situations, using 30 personality items). Results unanimously favored a model comprising three systematic components: acquiescence (endorsing all items more than other perceivers), positivity (endorsing positive over negative items), and trait specificity (endorsing items reflecting a specific trait more). The latter two factors each accounted for approximately a quarter of the variance in perceiver effects, and acquiescence accounted for less than 10%. Positivity was more influential for evaluative items and was strongly associated with how likable perceivers found their targets to be ( r = .55). With considerable statistical power and generalizability, our findings significantly improve the knowledge base regarding the structure of perceiver effects.

Person knowledge shapes face identity perception

Recognition of others' identity through facial features is essential in life. Using both correlational and experimental approaches, we examined how person knowledge biases the perception of others' facial identity. When a participant believed any two individuals were more similar in personality, their faces were perceived to be correspondingly more similar (assessed via mousetracking, Study 1). Further, participants' facial representations of target individuals that were believed to have a more similar personality were found to have a greater physical resemblance (assessed via reverse-correlation, Studies 2 and 3). Finally, when participants learned about novel individuals who had a more similar personality, their faces were visually represented more similarly (Study 4). Together, the findings show that the perception of facial identity is driven not only by facial features but also the person knowledge we have learned about others, biasing it toward alternate identities despite the fact that those identities lack any physical resemblance.

Are Autistic and Alexithymic Traits Distinct? A Factor-Analytic and Network Approach

Despite the heterogeneity in autism, socioemotional difficulties are often framed as universal. Increasing evidence, however, suggests that socioemotional difficulties may be explained by alexithymia, a distinct yet frequently co-occurring condition. If, as some propose, autistic traits are responsible for socioemotional impairments, then alexithymia may itself be a symptom of autism. We aimed to determine whether alexithymia should be considered a product of autism or regarded as a separate condition. Using factor-analytic and network approaches, we provide evidence that alexithymic and autistic traits are distinct. We argue that: (1) models of socioemotional processing in autism should conceptualise difficulties as intrinsic to alexithymia; and (2) assessment of alexithymia is crucial for diagnosis and personalised interventions.

Evaluating Belief System Networks as a Theory of Political Belief System Dynamics

A theory of political belief system dynamics should incorporate causal connections between elements of the belief system and the possibility that belief systems are influenced by exogenous factors. These necessary components can be satisfied by conceptualizing an individual's belief system as a network of causally connected attitudes and identities which, via the interactions between the elements and the push of exogenous influences, produces the disparate phenomena in the belief systems literature. We implement this belief systems as networks theory in a dynamic Ising model and demonstrate that the theory can integrate at least six otherwise unrelated phenomenon in the political belief systems literature, including work on attitude consistency, cross-pressures, spillover effects, partisan cues, and ideological differences in attitude consensus. Our findings suggest that belief systems are not just one thing, but emerge from the interactions between the attitudes and identities in the belief system. All code is available: https://osf.io/aswy8/?view_only=99aff77909094bddabb5d382f6db2622.

Facial Stereotype Bias Is Mitigated by Training

People automatically infer others’ personality (e.g., trustworthiness) based on facial appearance, and such facial stereotype biases predict real-world consequences across political, legal, and business domains. The present research tested whether these biases can be mitigated through counterstereotype training aimed at reconfiguring the associations between specific facial appearances and social traits. Across six studies and a replication, a behavioral counterstereotype training consistently reduced or eliminated facial stereotype biases for White male faces in the context of economic trust games, hiring decisions, and even automatic evaluations assessed via evaluative priming. Together, the results demonstrate a fundamental malleability in facial stereotyping related to trustworthiness, with a minimal training able to mitigate the tendency to activate and apply long-held, highly automatized facial stereotypes. These findings suggest that face impressions are more flexible than typically appreciated, and they provide a potential inroad toward combating our ingrained biases based on facial appearance.

Dynamic interactive theory as a domain-general account of social perception

The perception of social categories, emotions, and personality traits from others' faces each have been studied extensively but in relative isolation. We synthesize emerging findings suggesting that, in each of these domains of social perception, both a variety of bottom-up facial features and top-down social cognitive processes play a part in driving initial perceptions. Among such top-down processes, social-conceptual knowledge in particular can have a fundamental structuring role in how we perceive others' faces. Extending the Dynamic Interactive framework (Freeman & Ambady, 2011), we outline a perspective whereby the perception of social categories, emotions, and traits from faces can all be conceived as emerging from an integrated system relying on domain-general cognitive properties. Such an account of social perception would envision perceptions to be a rapid, but gradual, process of negotiation between the variety of visual cues inherent to a person and the social cognitive knowledge an individual perceiver brings to the perceptual process. We describe growing evidence in support of this perspective as well as its theoretical implications for social psychology.