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. 2022 Nov 9;17(11):e0276400.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0276400. eCollection 2022.

Disclosing political partisanship polarizes first impressions of faces

Brittany S Cassidy  1 , Colleen Hughes  2 , Anne C Krendl  3
Affiliations

Disclosing political partisanship polarizes first impressions of faces

Brittany S Cassidy et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Americans' increasing levels of ideological polarization contribute to pervasive intergroup tensions based on political partisanship. Cues to partisanship may affect even the most basic aspects of perception. First impressions of faces constitute a widely-studied basic aspect of person perception relating to intergroup tensions. To understand the relation between face impressions and political polarization, two experiments were designed to test whether disclosing political partisanship affected face impressions based on perceivers' political ideology. Disclosed partisanship more strongly affected people's face impressions than actual, undisclosed, categories (Experiment 1). In a replication and extension, disclosed shared and opposing partisanship also engendered, respectively, positive and negative changes in face impressions (Experiment 2). Partisan disclosure effects on face impressions were paralleled by the extent of people's partisan threat perceptions (Experiments 1 and 2). These findings suggest that partisan biases appear in basic aspects of person perception and may emerge concomitant with perceived partisan threat.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Predicted probability of choosing a Democrat (vs. Republican) as a function of Trait (competent, likable), Task Version (not-disclosed or disclosed labels), and perceiver political ideology.
Points represent the condition means and whiskers represent the standard error of the mean. ** = < .001; NS = non-significant.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Predicted likability as a function of Time, Label (party of evaluated face), and composite political ideology (+1 SD: More conservative; -1 SD = more liberal).
Points represent the condition means and whiskers represent the standard error of the mean.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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