How Gender Affects the Way We See a Face

Narrator: Snap judgments, the opinions we form of others at first glance, can be wrong—and more often than you might expect. You may find someone trustworthy, competent, or aggressive, and probably formed your impression within a hundredth of a second. But it can be wildly inaccurate. Chicago Booth’s Alexander Todorov and his coauthors have been running studies on snap judgments to learn on what, exactly, we are forming these opinions.

Alexander Todorov: There are many different procedures to measure these processes. You can limit the decision time they have, and that doesn’t seem to make a difference; you can ask them to ignore particular kinds of information, and that rarely works. So these are the conditions under which we can delineate the sort of automatic effects of judgments. Then, we do computational modelings where we simply ask people to rate various faces, and we have mathematical models, so you can think of each face as represented by a set of numbers. And then we can model various perceptions or judgments or impressions like trustworthiness, aggressiveness, criminal appearance, as a function of the face variation. Then we can generate a model that visualizes: What are the features in the face that lead to particular judgments?

Narrator: The researchers find, among other things, that we tend to evaluate men and women very differently. Take faces that don’t fit the norm—male faces that look a little feminine, or female faces that look a little masculine.

Alexander Todorov: To the extent that female faces look counterstereotypical, they get to be judged in a much more negative way. If a male face actually looks feminine, if anything, it helps the perceptions of the person because femininity is generally perceived as attractive, and it’s also associated with good personality characteristics like being nurturing, even if that might not be true. But if a female face looks masculine, that generally leads to many negative evaluations, including not only in terms of attractiveness, but also on a whole set of characteristics. So to the extent that women’s appearance doesn’t fit the expected stereotypes, the evaluation would tend to be negative. This is under conditions where we know nothing, but the only thing we have is the appearance in front of our eyes.

Narrator: Snap judgments are often tougher on women. For example, the researchers collected data on facial features that we associate with competence. They find that attractiveness is a key to whether we perceive someone as competent, but gender is an important factor too.

Alexander Todorov: So we can take an actual face and make it appear more or less competent, which in this particular case, we’re adding masculinity, really. And so as we are adding more masculinity to male faces, they in fact are perceived as more competent. So it works in their favor. But if we start adding more masculinity to female faces, it works up to a point, and then, in fact, the impression becomes much more negative. Suddenly, we have a drop in perceived competence. And the reason is because masculinity is not a characteristic that people expect to see in women. And when they see it, they actually react to it negatively.

Narrator: The researchers say that when you get to know the person you have formed an opinion of, you gather more information about them. You may end up changing your mind and realizing that your initial judgment that you made about them was wrong.

Alexander Todorov: But the question is whether the first impression will determine the extent to which you will have observations. If I decide on my first impressions that you’re not worth my time and I never get to interact with you, or I don’t hire you, I will never be able to find, in fact, whether you are competent or not. So this is the problem that they kind of can act in a sense as gatekeeping, but if you are in a situation in which you could observe the behavior of the person, and this behavior is inconsistent with our initial impressions, we change our minds. We do it all the time.

Narrator: It’s much harder to combat the stereotypes that snap judgments reveal, particularly if those judgments prevent you from ever really getting to know certain types of people.