Research Proposal Intro

Annotated Bibliography

Leila Bazzi

Dr. Zhong Xu Lui

Experimental Psychology

2-14-19

Article #1

Lin, C., Adolphs, R., & Alvarez, R. M. (2018). Inferring Whether Officials Are Corruptible from Looking at Their Faces. Psychological Science, 29 (11), 1807-1823.

In the target article, “Inferring Whether Officials Are Corruptible from Looking at Their Faces”, the main topic is inferring character traits from a facial expression as it relates to a real-world outcome. This article provides an evaluation which intends to find out how facial inferences is related to the outcome that has a close connection with the face bearer’s mode of behaving. The authors of the article aim at investigating political officials on corruption based on their facial expression. The main raise of using facial based conclusion in this study is because facial inferences are able to guide people’s social behavior due to the fact that facial expression is rich in information. The study clearly shows that people can be able to separate corrupt politicians from clean ones by simply looking at portraits.

The article consisted of researchers gathering four preregistered studies of 325 sample participants who filed through photos of elected officials in order to make trait judgements of probable corruptibility. Study 1 inspected state and federal officials, whereas Study 2 examined officials from lower levels of government. In Study 3, the researchers examined whether the results from the previous studies correlated with corruptibility reasoning. Furthermore, in Study 4 the researchers narrowed the study down to the specific features of officials that appear them to look corruptible. As stated, the experimental design in this study was conducted through four different parts; this is where the strength of the study can be based on, in which the researchers collected pictures of politicians which were presented to volunteers. The participants were asked to rate how each politician was corrupt, selfish, generous, trustworthy, and dishonest. The findings from the research raises many questions which would otherwise provide a basis for future research. An example of a question that I suspected to be unanswered is, “What is the underlying mechanism for the relation between possible corruption and politician’s records?” I think that the findings from the article raise the question as to why politicians who are corrupt are elected in office in the first place, seeming as people are able to tell that they are corrupt simply by having a look at them. The weaknesses of this study also include that there are other factors, rather than a face-first impression, that come into the picture and override initial face judgments.

Overall, the study investigated quite an interesting matter. With that being said, my group has selected this topic to research based off of our natural curiosity on the subject. Rather, instead of looking at the face of an official as a whole, we are going to be focusing on studying the eye vs. mouth region of their faces. We chose to focus on the aforementioned face regions due to the fact that they are the biggest indicators of lying or deceiving. Therefore, participants paying closer attention to these facial regions will hopefully help us in answering our research question.

Articles from within the target article

Article #2

Cogsdill, E. J., Todorov, A. T., Spelke, E. S., & Banaji, M. R. (2014). Inferring Character from Faces: A Developmental Study. Psychological Science, 25, 1132–1139.

This article discusses many similar things as our target article does, such as participants’ presuming a person’s character by looking simply looking at computer-generated faces, categorizing them to be low or high on perceived trustworthiness, competence, or dominance. This article can contribute to our project due to the correspondence of the study as well as its results.

Article #3

Lin, C., Adolphs, R., & Alvarez, R. M. (2017). Cultural effects on the association between election outcomes and face- based trait inferences. PLOS ONE, 12(7), Article e0180837. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0180837

This article also heavily relates to the target article we examined, correlating how competent a politician looks with whether the politician gets elected. In addition, it goes further to explain cultural differences in candidate appearances. For example, the article dives into detail about how American politicians tend to show more excited smiles in their candidacy photos compared to Chinese politicians. All in all, these cultural distinctions contribute to how face-based trait assumptions that are made correlate with actual election outcomes.

Article #4

Rule, N. O., Krendl, A. C., Ivcevic, Z., & Ambady, N. (2013). Accuracy and consensus in judgments of trustworthiness from faces: Behavioral and neural correlates. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104, 409–426.

This article dives into the accuracy of first impression judgements made by looking at faces. The results from this article will definitely help us answer our research question considering the authors conducted 5 different studies to authenticate their findings.

Article #5

Todorov, A., Olivola, C. Y., Dotsch, R., & Mende-Siedlecki, P. (2015). Social attributions from faces: Determinants, con- sequences, accuracy, and functional significance. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 519–545.

This article makes multiple points on how people make social attributions from faces. To be specific, the article entails a summary box which includes the various ways that influence social attributions and how they are decided by looking at a face. Taking note of the 8 points listed and keeping them in mind while conducting our own research can help effectively help us.

New articles

Article #6

Andrew D. Engell, James V. Haxby, and Alexander Todorov. (2007) Implicit Trustworthiness Decisions: Automatic Coding of Face Properties in the Human Amygdala. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 2007 Vol. 19, 1508-1519. 

Among the articles I came across, this was one of the most interesting. This study involved participants deciding whether an unfamiliar face was trustworthy or not by using functional magnetic resonance imaging to display amygdala response rates. A study like this would definitely be beneficial for my group to read before beginning our research.

Article #7

Suzuki, A., Tsukamoto, S., & Takahashi, Y. (2017). Faces Tell Everything in a Just and Biologically Determined World: Lay Theories Behind Face Reading. Social Psychological and Personality Science,10 (1), 62-72. doi:10.1177/1948550617734616.

This article discusses multiple theories, specifically the “physiognomic belief”, the generic belief that numerous traits can simply be inferred from faces. Both countries, U.S. and Japan heavily demonstrate this belief. As stated in the article, “the physiognomic belief is positively associated with a biologically deterministic view of personality traits and a belief in a just world”. This research correlates directly with the study we will be conducting.

Article #8

Kramer, R. S., Mileva, M., & Ritchie, K. L. (2018). Inter-rater agreement in trait judgements from faces. Plos One,13(8). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0202655

This article stood out from the rest due to the type of study it was. Kramer’s study dives into trait judgements from faces by incorporating inter-rater reliability. This is when there are multiple raters rating the same performance or behavior in order to check for agreement in ratings. Using this type of reliability only strengthens the study and solidifies its’ findings.

Article #9

Sakuta, Y., Kanazawa, S., & Yamaguchi, M. K. (2018). Infants prefer a trustworthy person: An early sign of social cognition in infants. Plos One,13(9). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0203541

This article has many diverse aspects, starting with the study itself. The participants of this study are infants, measuring their preferability for trustworthy faces. To clarify previous studies from adults, the researchers examined whether 6-8 month old infants preferred a trustworthy face to an untrustworthy one when both faces were high in dominance. The findings of this study suggest that the perception of trustworthiness based on facial images emerges early on in child development.