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.
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.
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.
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.
