March 7, 2019: Kurt Hugenberg

The face of humanity: Face perception as an origin of (de)humanization

Robust evidence from the dehumanization literature indicates that intergroup motives can often lead to the ascription or withholding of sophisticated humanlike faculties from others. In the present research, I discuss a novel means by dehumanizing inferences of others occurs: the perceptual cues in others’ faces. Here, I summarize multiple lines of work demonstrating that stable facial features (e.g., facial structure), labile facial cues (e.g., expressions; eye gaze), and general face perception processes (e.g., configural face processing) can all result in dehumanizing responses to others, often with effects as large as those observed for intergroup-driven dehumanization. This perspective implies potentially surprising but often unnoticed causes and consequences for who is seen as sophisticated or simplistic, and who is seen as valued or devalued.

The colloquium will be held in Psychology Building 035.