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People Can Accurately (But Not Adaptively) Judge Strangers’ Antigay Prejudice from Faces

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Abstract

The ecological theory of social perception suggests that people’s first impressions should be especially accurate for judgments relevant to their goals. Here, we tested whether people could accurately judge others’ levels of antigay prejudice and whether gay men’s accuracy would exceed straight men’s accuracy in making these judgments. We found that people judged men’s (but not women’s) levels of antigay prejudice accurately from photos of their faces and that impressions of facial power supported their judgments. Gay men and straight men did not significantly differ in their sensitivity to antigay prejudice, however. People may therefore judge others’ levels of prejudice accurately regardless of their personal stake in its consequences.

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Notes

  1. We did not collect the ages of 97 of these participants due to a programming error.

  2. Confidence intervals obtained by bootstrapping the analysis 5000 times.

  3. As in Study 1, the Facial Power composite again mediated the accuracy of these judgments (ab = .13, 95% CI [.02, .25]).

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to RA and NOR. We thank Garrett Arathoon, Joseph Choi, Emerson Daniele, and Chuyun Shen for their assistance in experimental set-up.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 3G3, Canada

    Ravin Alaei & Nicholas O. Rule

Authors
  1. Ravin Alaei
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  2. Nicholas O. Rule
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Contributions

Experimental design: RA and NOR; Data collection: RA and NOR; Data analysis: RA; Writing: RA and NOR.

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Correspondence to Ravin Alaei.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Standards

All procedures performed in this study followed the ethical standards of the University of Toronto Research Ethics Board and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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We obtained informed consent from all participants included in the study.

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Alaei, R., Rule, N.O. People Can Accurately (But Not Adaptively) Judge Strangers’ Antigay Prejudice from Faces. J Nonverbal Behav 43, 397–409 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-019-00305-2

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