Targets’ Facial Width-to-Height Ratio Biases Pain Judgments

The accurate perception of others’ pain is important for both perceivers and targets. Yet, like other person perception judgments, pain judgments are prone to biases. Although past work has begun detailing characteristics of targets that can bias pain judgments (e.g., race, gender), the current work examines a novel source of bias inherent to all targets: structural characteristics of the human face. Specifically, we present four studies demonstrating that facial width-to-height ratio, a stable feature of all faces, biases pain judgments. Compared to those with low facial width-to-height ratio, individuals with high facial width-to-height ratio are perceived as experiencing less pain in otherwise identical situations (Studies 1, 2, & 3), and as needing less pain medication to salve their injuries (Study 4). This process was observed for White but not Black targets (Study 2), and manipulations of facial width-to-height ratio affected pain perceptions even when target identity was held constant (Study 4). Together, these findings implicate face structure in judgments of others’ pain

Exoneree Stigma-By-Association

The current study examined whether criminal history or prison time impacts landlords’ willingness to rent their apartment to exonerees (compared to releasees and control) and individuals who spent 5 or 25 years in prison

Nonverbal facial cues signaling sexually transmitted infections cause dehumanization and discrimination

Dehumanization often underlies the social ostracism, exclusion, and discrimination experienced by stigmatized group members. Given findings that people can detect sexually transmitted infection (STI) status from nonverbal facial cues, we tested whether people would dehumanize and discriminate against STI-positive individuals from detecting their stigmatized status. Specifically, we hypothesized that nonverbal stigma cues would stimulate dehumanizing reactions that lead to biases against hiring STI-positive individuals. Results showed that people dehumanize STI-positive individuals based on their nonverbal stigma cues (i.e., negative affect; Study 1), except when STI status is explicitly disclosed (Study 2), which leads to potential hiring biases (Study 3). Dehumanization and discrimination against STI-positive individuals may therefore depend on the stigma's legibility from nonverbal cues but may be tempered by explicit information about STI status

Facing humanness: Facial width-to-height ratio predicts ascriptions of humanity

The ascription of mind to others is central to social cognition. Most research on the ascription of mind has focused on motivated, top-down processes. The current work provides novel evidence that facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) serves as a bottom-up perceptual signal of humanness. Using a range of well-validated operational definitions of humanness, we provide evidence across five studies that target faces with relatively greater fWHR are seen as less than fully human compared to their relatively lower fWHR counterparts. We then present two ancillary studies exploring whether the fWHR-to-humanness link is mediated by previously established fWHR-trait links in the literature. Finally, three additional studies extend this fWHR-humanness link beyond measurements of humanness, demonstrating that the fWHR-humanness link has consequences for downstream social judgments including the sorts of crimes people are perceived to be guilty of and the social tasks for which they seem helpful. In short, we provide evidence for the hypothesis that individuals with relatively greater facial width-to-height ratio are routinely denied sophisticated, humanlike minds