Snap judgment

The enlightened amongst us like to think that they're free from biases and prejudice, that they treat everyone fairly, that they make no judgments about people until they have information.

Unfortunately, that's probably not true.  A study by Jonathan Freeman et al. at New York University that appeared last week in Nature Neuroscience has shown that we all are susceptible to stereotyping people based on gender and race -- and that those stereotypes are remarkably hard to eradicate.

What Freeman and his team did was to take advantage of a technique for detecting unconscious cognitive impulses.  Using sensitive mouse-tracking software, the researchers were able to monitor split-second movements of the hands of the test subjects.  Presented with a variety of photographs of faces, and a list of descriptors ("angry," "happy," "fearful," "neutral," etc.) the participants had to select the word they thought was most appropriate -- but the software was keeping track of where their hands went as soon as the photograph flashed on the screen.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What happened is that the ultimate word selection is often not what the test subject had initially moved toward.  And far from there being no correlation -- in other words, that the initial hand motion was random until the subject decided his/her actual answer -- the unconscious impulses followed a rather disturbing pattern.

Female faces were far more likely to elicit a movement toward words like "happy" or "passive" or "appeasing," regardless of the actual expression their faces showed.  Men generated movement toward "strong," "aggressive," and "dominant."  More troubling still, photographs of African American males caused people to tend toward "angry" and "hostile."

And remember, these judgments were completely independent of the actual expression of the person in the photograph.  A neutral African American male still triggered negative judgments, a frowning female face labels of passivity and compliance.

"Previous studies have shown that how we perceive a face may, in turn, influence our behavior," said Ryan Stolier, an NYU doctoral student and lead author of the research. "Our findings therefore shed light upon an important and perhaps unanticipated route through which unintended bias may influence interpersonal behavior."

"Our findings provide evidence that the stereotypes we hold can systematically alter the brain's visual representation of a face, distorting what we see to be more in line with our biased expectations," Freeman said.  "For example, many individuals have ingrained stereotypes that associate men as being more aggressive, women as being more appeasing, or Black individuals as being more hostile—though they may not endorse these stereotypes personally.  Our results suggest that these sorts of stereotypical associations can shape the basic visual processing of other people, predictably warping how the brain 'sees' a person's face."

These findings are unsettling.  A lot of us like to think that we've grown past our tendency to make snap judgments about people based on their ethnicity and gender, but it turns out that we may not be as free of them as we believe.  You have to wonder how much these sorts of tendencies play in to things like the targeting of African American males by policemen.  When an instantaneous reaction on the part of a police officer can mean the difference between life and death, there may not be time to override the unconscious jump to judgment that all of our brains make, and that the rest of us have the leisure to rethink.

So are we all bigots at heart?  The conclusion may not be as dire as all that.  The virtue is not in eliminating automatic stereotypical thinking, but in becoming conscious of it, in not letting those thoughts (which are almost certainly incorrect) go unquestioned.  It behooves us all to consider what goes on in our brains as rationally as possible, and not simply to accept whatever pops into our minds as the literal fact.

Or, as Michael Shermer put it:  "Don't believe everything you think."

Face value

I find it fascinating, and often a little unsettling, how we fool ourselves into thinking that our responses, reactions, and thoughts are intelligent.

Now, don't get me wrong, here.  Some of them are.  My writing a blog about rationalism would be a little pointless if we were incapable of thinking rationally, after all.

On the other hand, it's worthwhile keeping in mind the awareness of how much of our behavior is on the instinctive level.  So many of our responses are based on misperception, gut reactions, and inaccurate processing that it's a wonder that we function as well as we do.

Yet another blow to our sense that our brains are making decisions based on logic came this week, when a team of psychologists at New York University published research that indicates that our judgments about whether a face is trustworthy happen within a fraction of a second of our seeing it -- far too fast for it to be a conscious decision.

Jonathan Freeman, Ryan Stoller, Zachary Ingbretsen, and Eric Hehman did a fascinating study in which subjects were placed inside a fMRI scanner, and monitored while they were shown images of human faces for only a few milliseconds, too quickly to register in the conscious mind.  The facial images were also "backward masked" -- followed by irrelevant images that had been shown to terminate the activity of the brain's facial processing systems.  Therefore, none of the facial images reached the conscious awareness of the test subjects (something confirmed by questioning after the experiment was concluded).

The researchers then looked at the response of the amygdala, a part of the brain that previous studies had found was active when people make judgments about trustworthiness, safety, and risk.

Earlier research had indicated that faces with high inner eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones are rated as more trustworthy than faces with low inner eyebrows and shallow cheekbones, so they created artificial images of human faces with a range of differences in these features.

And the flashing images made the activity in the amygdala increase.  The faces designed to be untrustworthy, especially, triggered a response in the fear and anxiety centers of the amygdala.  Freeman writes:

Our findings suggest that the brain automatically responds to a face’s trustworthiness before it is even consciously perceived. The results are consistent with an extensive body of research suggesting that we form spontaneous judgments of other people that can be largely outside awareness... These findings provide evidence that the amygdala’s processing of social cues in the absence of awareness may be more extensive than previously understood. The amygdala is able to assess how trustworthy another person’s face appears without it being consciously perceived.

Which is fascinating, and (of course) you can immediately see the evolutionary advantage of these kinds of snap judgments.  The survival cost of misassessing a person's face varies depending on the kind of mistake you make.  If you mistake an trustworthy person for an untrustworthy one, the risk is usually low; the reverse can be costly, even deadly.

Illustration from a 19th century book on physiognomy [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But of course, that means we sometimes do get it wrong.  Our brains, wired through millions of years of natural selection, manage pretty well most of the time, but that doesn't mean that it's always acting on the basis of anything... smart.  "Evolution," as Richard Dawkins put it, "is the law of whatever works."  As long as the end result is protecting us and our progeny, it doesn't really matter if it's operating in a screwy sort of fashion.

So this, of course, blows yet another hole in our sense that our responses are because of some sort of logical thought process.  Oh, no doubt we append all sorts of rationalizations afterwards.  Our immediate impressions, after all, are sometimes right, and if we find out afterwards that the guy we instantly disliked was a nasty bit of work, it reinforces our sense that we're behaving in an intelligent fashion.

But this study should make you question your snap judgments, and apply your logic centers sooner rather than later.  If, as Freeman et al. have shown, the kinds of things we're using to form our impressions of each other include the shapes of peoples eyebrows and cheekbones, it might be time to pay less attention to our "gut instincts."