Moral character in person and group perception

In forming an impression of an individual or a group, we may have a variety of information about their traits and behaviors. Extensive research has shown that most of this information can be characterized in terms of two global dimensions: warmth and competence. Warmth pertains to benevolence in social relations and involves qualities such as friendliness, kindness, cooperativeness, and trustworthiness. In contrast, competence refers to the power to perform and influence others and involves qualities such as efficiency, intelligence, strength, and capability.

Our research suggests that warmth encompasses both sociability (e.g., friendliness and likeability) and morality (e.g., honesty and trustworthiness) characteristics, and that morality tends to be far more important than sociability (and competence) in determining the impressions we form of other individuals and groups. Our research further suggests that morality has such a large effect on impressions because another party’s morality is essential to establishing whether they represent an opportunity or a threat.

More recent work shows that moral information plays a key role in revising and updating impressions over time. It also suggests that moral information has a particularly strong generalization potential, with judgments of moral character extending to broader evaluations of others.

Face perception

Our impressions of others are often based on limited information that is spontaneously and automatically extracted from their appearance, in particular, their faces. Our research examines how we use facial cues to categorize people into social groups, perceive their emotions, and infer their personality traits.

In one line of work, we investigated how facial appearance and contextual information jointly shape perceptions of trustworthiness, a central component of perceived moral character. Building on our work showing that morality is particularly important because it signals whether others represent an opportunity or a threat, we asked whether this link also emerges when moral character is inferred from someone’s appearance rather than from verbal descriptions of their behavior. Our findings consistently show that individuals are judged as less trustworthy when their faces are presented in threatening, as opposed to neutral or merely negative, contexts. These findings highlight the malleable nature of trustworthiness perception and show how contextual threat can shape moral impressions based on facial appearance.

Our research also examines how different sources of information—faces, voices, and behavior—are integrated when people form and revise social impressions. We investigate how information conveyed by these different modalities is combined over time and how newly encountered cues can revise previously formed impressions. This work highlights the importance of multimodal information in understanding how social impressions dynamically evolve.

Finally, we have investigated the social meaning of more subtle perceptual cues, including pupil size, as well as the role of familiarity and social biases in judgments derived from facial appearance.

​Social categorization, stereotyping, and prejudice

Social categorization provides an efficient way of organizing information about others, but it can also activate stereotypes and evaluative biases. Our research examines the content of social stereotypes and their consequences for person perception and intergroup relations. We investigate how stereotypes shape impression formation and the evaluation of members of different social groups, including judgments based on gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.

Our work also examines how moral evaluations and perceived threat contribute to prejudice and discrimination.