Schedule of Events | Symposia

The Influence of Social Exclusion on Perceptions of Facial Trustworthiness

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Sabina Raja¹ (sraja1@uchicago.edu), Anita Restrepo¹, Elizabeth P. Gaillard¹, Emily M. Silver¹, Greg J. Norman¹; ¹University of Chicago

Inferred social attributions, such as perceived facial trustworthiness, are rapidly and reliably formed based on static structural features of the face, helping us navigate complex social environments. While perceptions of facial trustworthiness have been extensively studied in neutral social contexts, their stability under non-neutral social contexts, such as social exclusion, remains less understood. The present study explored whether judgments of facial trustworthiness remain stable after experiences of social exclusion, a form of social threat empirically demonstrated to alter social information processing. Participants (n = 92) were recruited and randomized into exclusion or inclusion conditions using the Ostracism Online Paradigm. Trustworthiness ratings of low-, medium-, and high-trust faces were collected pre- and post-manipulation. A 3×2 mixed-design ANOVA evaluated changes in facial trustworthiness ratings from pre- to post-manipulation as a function of condition (inclusion vs. exclusion) and facial trustworthiness category (low, medium, high). As expected, social exclusion increased negative affect, decreased positive affect, and diminished feelings of belonging. However, the exclusion manipulation had no impact on facial trustworthiness ratings. These findings suggest that judgments of facial trustworthiness, driven by automatic and ingrained perceptual heuristics, remain stable even under conditions of social threats like exclusion. These results highlight the robustness of facial trustworthiness judgments in non-neutral social contexts, underscoring their reliance on static facial features and rapid social-cognitive heuristics. Future research should explore whether these findings generalize to more dynamic or diverse facial stimuli and investigate how exclusion influences other social attributions and subsequent behavior.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Person perception