Do Vladimir Putin and Justin Bieber look alike? They do if you think they have similar personalities, shows a new study by a team of psychologists. Its findings, which appear in the journal Cognition, reveal that knowledge of a personâs personality can influence the perception of a faceâs identity and bias it toward unrelated identities. For example, if Vladimir Putin and Justin Bieber, a pair of faces among many tested in the research, have more similar personalities in your mind, then they visually appear more similar to you as well, even if they lack any physical resemblance. âOur face is anotherâs portal into our thoughts, feelings, and intentions,â explains Jonathan Freeman, an associate professor in New York Universityâs Department of Psychology and the paperâs senior author. âIf the perception of othersâ faces is systematically warped by our prior understanding of their personality, as our findings show, it could affect the ways we behave and interact with them.â The paperâs other authors were DongWon Oh, a postdoctoral researcher in NYUâs Department of Psychology, and Mirella Walker, a researcher at the University of Basel. The authors add that the research informs fundamental scientific understanding of how face recognition works in the brain, suggesting that not only a faceâs visual cues but also prior social knowledge plays an active role in perceiving faces. Face recognition is essential to everyday lifeâin identifying a neighbor at the supermarket, an actor in a film trailer, or a relative in a photograph. And, in recent years, it has been applied to technologies, ranging from the Apple iPhone to extensive counterterrorism and law enforcement applicationsâwith many raising concerns over accuracy. The Association for Computing Machinery called for a suspension of both private and government use of facial-recognition technology, citing âclear bias based on ethnic, racial, gender, and other human characteristics,â Nature reported last year. To better understand how our own perceptionsâand biasesâmight influence how we recognize faces, the researchers conducted a series of experiments centering on perceptions of well-known individualsâBieber, Putin, John Travolta, George W. Bush, and Ryan Gosling, among others (Note: White males were selected in order to establish a racial and gender baseline across tested faces). Racially and ethnically diverse male and female participants were drawn from âMechanical Turkâ (MTurk), a tool in which individuals are compensated for completing small tasks; it is frequently used in running behavioral science studies. Overall, they found that when a participant believed any two individuals were more similar in personality, their faces were perceived to be correspondingly more similar. To provide causal evidence, the researchers determined if the effect held for individuals they had never encountered before. The participants viewed images of other White males whom they reported no familiarity with. If the participants learned that these individualsâ personalities were similar (as opposed to dissimilar), their faces were perceived as more visually similar, too. The researchers used several techniques to assess how faces were perceived at a less conscious level. Subjectsâ responses were measured with an innovative mouse-tracking software Freeman previously developed; it uses individualsâ hand movements to reveal unconscious cognitive processes. Unlike surveys or ratings, in which test subjects can consciously alter their responses, this technique requires subjects to make split-second decisions, thereby uncovering less conscious tendencies through subtle deflections in their hand-motion trajectory as they move a mouse during experiments. They also used a technique known as reverse correlation, which allowed the researchers to generate face images depicting how participants perceived others âin the mindâs eye.â âOur findings show that the perception of facial identity is driven not only by facial features, such as the eyes and chin, but also distorted by the social knowledge we have learned about others, biasing it toward alternate identities despite the fact that those identities lack any physical resemblance,â observes Freeman.
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DongWon Oh et al, Person knowledge shapes face identity perception, Cognition (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104889 Citation: This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no The post People look alike if we think they have similar personalities, new study finds recently appeared on Medical Update News.
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