Research

Research

Hugenberg Laboratory

Research in our lab focuses on how perceivers’ stereotypes, prejudices, and prejudice-related motives influence how we categorize, perceive, and understand others. Much of the work that we do has a particular focus on how perceptions of others’ faces and bodies interface with beliefs about social groups.

 

Current Research Topics

Social Cognition

In one ongoing line of research, we have been investigating how we use cues in others faces and bodies to make inferences about their minds. Put simply, how do we decide whether someone is mentally sophisticated or simplistic? Perhaps surprisingly, perceivers often use quick judgments about their faces and bodies to make these judgments. For example, we have found that how we perceive others’ faces is directly linked to how we perceive their minds. It appears that triggering basic face processing mechanisms we use to differentiate human faces appear to trigger inferences that people have minds behind their eyes. Further, perceivers often unwittingly use features of others faces and bodies themselves, such as their facial structure (e.g., facial width-to-height ratio), their eye gaze, and their body and bodily movements to make inferences about whether others have sophisticated humanlike minds, or not.

Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Person Perception

In a second line of ongoing research, we have investigated how social categories, and their attendant stereotypes, prejudices, and motives, can bias or distort how we read others’ faces and non-verbal behavior. In some of our early work, we have investigated how race and prejudice can distort how Whites read anger on the faces of Blacks, with especially highly prejudiced Whites essentially over-perceiving anger in otherwise neutrally expressive Black faces. More recently, we have extended this work to the perceptions of Blacks’ bodies as well, finding that White perceivers tend to over-perceive the size of Black males’ bodies, due to the race-related anxiety. Finally, we’ve also been investigating how racial stereotypes can influence how people make judgments about traits from faces. We have recently found that White Americans use racially prototypic features (i.e., features typical of racial group membership) to infer whether a face seems trustworthy or not.

The Interface of Social Identities and Computing

Finally, in a third major focus of our research we are applying our research on stereotyping to important real-world domains.  Amongst these, we are working with Indiana courts and the Coalition for Court Access to understand how access to civil justice in Indiana courts is related to how someone accesses the court (i.e., online vs. in person) and whether their own identities (e.g., stigmatized identities) influence access to justice. In an additional line of work, our research team is part of a large NSF Frontiers grant involving computer scientists at IU, Florida, and UW with the goal of centering the needs of marginalized and vulnerable populations in computing.

Featured Research Publications

Library

  • Kawakami, K., Amodio, D. M., & Hugenberg, K. (2017). Intergroup perception and cognition: An integrative framework for understanding the causes and consequences of social categorization. In J. M. Olson (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 55, pp. 1-80.
  • Lloyd, E. P., Hugenberg, K., McConnell, A. R., Kunstman, J. W., & Deska, J. C. (2017). Black and White lies: Race-based biases in deception judgments. Psychological Science, 28, 1125-1136.
  • Wilson, J. P., Hugenberg, K., & Rule, N. (2017). Racial bias in judgments of Physical size and formidability: From size to threat. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113, 59-80.
  • Deska, J. D., Lloyd, E. P., & Hugenberg, K. (2018a). Facing humanness: Facial width-to-height ratio predicts ascriptions of humanness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114, 75-94.
  • Summers, K. M., Deska, J. C., Almaraz, S. M., Hugenberg, K., & Lloyd, E. P.(2021).  Poverty and pain: Low-SES people are erroneously believed to be insensitive to pain. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 95, 104-116.
  • Alaei, R., Deska, J. C., Hugenberg, K., & Rule, N. O. (2022).People attribute humanness to men and women differently based on their facial appearance.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 123(2), 400-422.
  • Cassidy, B. S., Wiley, R. W., Sim, M., & Hugenberg, K. (2022). Decoding complex emotions and humanization show related face processing effects.Emotion, 22, 362-373.
  • Sim, M., Almaraz, S. M., & Hugenberg, K. (2022). Stereotyping at the intersection of race and weight: Diluted threat stereotyping of obese Black men. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 99, 104274.
  • Sim, M., Almaraz, S. M., & Hugenberg, K. (in press). Bodies and minds: Heavier-weight targets are de-mentalized as lacking in mental agency.Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
  • Quintanilla, V. D., Hugenberg, K., Hagan, M., Gonzales, A., & Hutchings, R. (in press). Digital inequalities and access to justice: Dialing into Zoom court unrepresented. In D. F. Engstrom (Ed.), Oxford Handbook on Legal Technology and the Future of Civil Justice. Cambridge University Press.