The many faces of compensation: The similarities and differences between social and facial models of perception

Abstract

Previous research shows that stereotypes can distort the visual representation of groups in a top-down fashion. In the present endeavor, we tested if the compensation effect—the negative relationship that emerges between the social dimensions of warmth and competence when judging two social targets—would bias the visual representations of these targets in a compensatory way. We captured participants’ near spontaneous facial prototypes of social targets by means of an unconstrained technique, namely the reverse correlation. We relied on a large multi-phase study (N = 869) and found that the expectations of the facial content of two novel groups that differed on one of the two social dimensions are biased in a compensatory manner on the facial dimensions of trustworthiness, warmth, and dominance but not competence. The present research opens new avenues by showing that compensation not only manifests itself on abstract ratings but that it also orients the visual representations of social targets.