How Do You Study Facial Bias Without Bias?

When we encounter an unfamiliar face, we tend to make snap judgments. Does the person look smart, attractive, or young? Are they trustworthy or corrupt? Neuroscientists and psychologists study how our brains form these facial biases, and how the judgments ultimately influence the way people behave. "We tend to be quite confident in the judgments we make based on people's faces, but we're often wrong," says Ralph Adolphs (PhD '93), Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology and an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience. Previous studies have linked these stereotypes and judgments to the decisions people make in various aspects of society, including elections, hiring practices, and court sentencing by juries. For instance, a Caltech study from Adolphs and Mike Alvarez, a political science professor, showed that people judged politicians to be more corrupt if they had wider faces, and that, in this case, these judgments coincided with whether the politicians had been convicted of corruption in real life. "Very important social decisions are influenced by the snap judgments that we make about people from their faces," says Adolphs. "By pointing out these biases, we hope that we can reduce their impact." In one recent study , Adolphs and his team, led by former Caltech graduate student Chujun Lin, now a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College, looked at how facial biases can be broken down into primary judgments.