People look alike if we think they have similar personalities, new study finds
Research shows how knowledge of an individual’s personality can affect facial recognition
IMAGE: KNOWLEDGE OF A PERSON’S PERSONALITY CAN WARP THE PERCEPTION OF A FACE’S IDENTITY AND BIAS IT TOWARD ALTERNATE IDENTITIES THAT ARE OSTENSIBLY UNRELATED. FOR EXAMPLE, IF VLADIMIR PUTIN AND JUSTIN BIEBER (ABOVE) HAVE MORE SIMILAR PERSONALITIES IN YOUR MIND, THEN THEY VISUALLY APPEAR MORE SIMILAR TO YOU AS WELL--AS SHOWN IN THE IMAGE. view more
CREDIT: IMAGE COURTESY OF NYU’S JONATHAN FREEMAN
Do Vladimir Putin and Justin Bieber look alike? They do if you think they have similar personalities, shows a new study by a team of psychologists.
Its findings, which appear in the journal Cognition, reveal that knowledge of a person’s personality can influence the perception of a face’s identity and bias it toward unrelated identities. For example, if Vladimir Putin and Justin Bieber, a pair of faces among many tested in the research, have more similar personalities in your mind, then they visually appear more similar to you as well, even if they lack any physical resemblance.
“Our face is another’s portal into our thoughts, feelings, and intentions,” explains Jonathan Freeman, an associate professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the paper’s senior author. “If the perception of others’ faces is systematically warped by our prior understanding of their personality, as our findings show, it could affect the ways we behave and interact with them.”
The paper’s other authors were DongWon Oh, a postdoctoral researcher in NYU’s Department of Psychology, and Mirella Walker, a researcher at the University of Basel.
The authors add that the research informs fundamental scientific understanding of how face recognition works in the brain, suggesting that not only a face’s visual cues but also prior social knowledge plays an active role in perceiving faces.
Face recognition is essential to everyday life--in identifying a neighbor at the supermarket, an actor in a film trailer, or a relative in a photograph. And, in recent years, it has been applied to technologies, ranging from the Apple iPhone to extensive counterterrorism and law enforcement applications--with many raising concerns over accuracy.
The Association for Computing Machinery called for a suspension of both private and government use of facial-recognition technology, citing “clear bias based on ethnic, racial, gender, and other human characteristics,” Nature reported last year.
To better understand how our own perceptions--and biases--might influence how we recognize faces, the researchers conducted a series of experiments centering on perceptions of well-known individuals--Bieber, Putin, John Travolta, George W. Bush, and Ryan Gosling, among others (Note: White males were selected in order to establish a racial and gender baseline across tested faces). Racially and ethnically diverse male and female participants were drawn from “Mechanical Turk” (MTurk), a tool in which individuals are compensated for completing small tasks; it is frequently used in running behavioral science studies.
Overall, they found that when a participant believed any two individuals were more similar in personality, their faces were perceived to be correspondingly more similar.
To provide causal evidence, the researchers determined if the effect held for individuals they had never encountered before. The participants viewed images of other White males whom they reported no familiarity with. If the participants learned that these individuals’ personalities were similar (as opposed to dissimilar), their faces were perceived as more visually similar, too.
The researchers used several techniques to assess how faces were perceived at a less conscious level. Subjects’ responses were measured with an innovative mouse-tracking software Freeman previously developed; it uses individuals’ hand movements to reveal unconscious cognitive processes. Unlike surveys or ratings, in which test subjects can consciously alter their responses, this technique requires subjects to make split-second decisions, thereby uncovering less conscious tendencies through subtle deflections in their hand-motion trajectory as they move a mouse during experiments. They also used a technique known as reverse correlation, which allowed the researchers to generate face images depicting how participants perceived others “in the mind’s eye.”
“Our findings show that the perception of facial identity is driven not only by facial features, such as the eyes and chin, but also distorted by the social knowledge we have learned about others, biasing it toward alternate identities despite the fact that those identities lack any physical resemblance,” observes Freeman.
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The study was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1654731).
JOURNAL
Cognition
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Experimental study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Person knowledge shapes face identity perception
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
1-Dec-2021
Do genetics control who our friends are? It seems so with mice
New UM School of Medicine study suggests pre-determined social preference may have implications for interactions ranging from relationship compatibility to understanding diseases associated with social avoidance
Peer-Reviewed PublicationIMAGE: MICE BEING FRIENDLY WITH ONE ANOTHER view more
CREDIT: MICHY KELLY
Have you ever met someone you instantly liked, or at other times, someone who you knew immediately that you did not want to be friends with, although you did not know why?
Popular author Malcolm Gladwell examined this phenomenon in his best-selling book, Blink. In his book, he noted that an “unconscious” part of the brain enables us to process information spontaneously, when, for example, meeting someone for the first time, interviewing someone for a job, or faced with making a decision quickly under stress.
Now, a new study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) suggests that there may be a biological basis behind this instantaneous compatibility reaction. A team of researchers showed that variations of an enzyme found in a part of the brain that regulates mood and motivation seems to control which mice want to socially interact with other mice — with the genetically similar mice preferring each other.
The UMSOM researchers, led by Michy Kelly, PhD, Associate Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology, say their findings may indicate that similar factors could contribute to the social choices people make. Understanding what factors drive these social preferences may help us to better recognize what goes awry in diseases associated with social withdrawal, such as schizophrenia or autism, so that better therapies can be developed.
The study was published on July 28 in Molecular Psychiatry, a Nature publication.
“We imagine that this is only the first among many biomarkers of compatibility in the brain that may control social preferences,” said Dr. Kelly. “Imagine the possibilities of truly understanding the factors behind human compatibility. You could better match relationships to reduce heartache and divorce rates, or better match patients and doctors to advance the quality of healthcare, as studies have shown compatibility can improve health outcomes.”
CAPTION
PDE11 (green) in the brains of two different mouse strains. In one strain the PDE11 is diffuse and the other it is bunched.
CREDIT
Michy Kelly
A succession of unlikely events and circumstances over the years eventually culminated in this research project, according to Dr. Kelly.
While she was working at a pharmaceutical company, a group of bone researchers asked Dr. Kelly to characterize the behavior of one of their mutant mice that was missing the PDE11 protein. She observed that these mice without PDE11 withdrew socially, so she knew that PDE11 had to be in the brain. She remembered a study that used a mouse model of schizophrenia in which the researchers damaged the brain’s hippocampus leading to antisocial behavior. She then looked at this part of the brain in healthy mice and found where the PDE11 protein was hiding.
Later, as a faculty member at University of South Carolina, she continued studying the social behavior of mutant mice in terms of their social reactions to scent. In the lab, researchers took wooden beads rubbed all over with pungent, airborne pheromones from one group of mice, and placed them in an enclosure with a second group. A mouse presented with one bead from a familiar friend and another from a new stranger mouse would typically spend more time investigating the bead with the stranger’s scent on it. When researchers looked at the PDE11 mutant’s preferences, they favored the stranger’s scent one hour or one week after meeting their friend, but one day after meeting—considered recent long-term memory for a mouse— their social memory seemed fuzzy, and they did not differentiate between a friend and a stranger. To the researchers this meant, the mice’s short and long-term social memory worked fine, but there was a problem coding the information into recent long-term memory—the time between short and long-term memory. Given more time, they would eventually recover that memory.
A student working in the laboratory offhandedly remarked that he noticed children with autism prefer to interact with others that have autism. So, Dr. Kelly decided they should test to see if the PDE11 mutants and normal mice had a preference with whom they interacted. The researchers found that PDE11 mutants preferred being around other PDE11 mutants over the normal mice, while normal mice also preferred their own genetic type. This discovery held true even when researchers tested other laboratory mouse strains. When they tested another genetic variant of PDE11 with a single change in the DNA code, mice with that genetic variation preferred other mice with the same variant over any others.
“So, what is it that the mice are sensing that determines their friend preferences?” said Dr. Kelly. “We eliminated smell and body movements as contributing factors, but we still have some other ideas to test.”
“What this team has done is to establish a paradigm by which researchers can identify the social underpinnings of friendship in animal models,” said E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, UM Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and Dean, University of Maryland School of Medicine. "This very important finding is just the start, but hopefully will lead to exciting new avenues of biological or social treatments for diseases like schizophrenia or age-related cognitive decline in which severe social avoidance and isolation can reduce a person’s quality of life.”
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This study was supported by start-up funds from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH101130), and a grant from the National Institute of Aging (R01AG061200).
About the University of Maryland School of Medicine
Now in its third century, the University of Maryland School of Medicine was chartered in 1807 as the first public medical school in the United States. It continues today as one of the fastest growing, top-tier biomedical research enterprises in the world -- with 46 academic departments, centers, institutes, and programs, and a faculty of more than 3,000 physicians, scientists, and allied health professionals, including members of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, and a distinguished two-time winner of the Albert E. Lasker Award in Medical Research. With an operating budget of more than $1.2 billion, the School of Medicine works closely in partnership with the University of Maryland Medical Center and Medical System to provide research-intensive, academic and clinically based care for nearly 2 million patients each year. The School of Medicine has nearly $600 million in extramural funding, with most of its academic departments highly ranked among all medical schools in the nation in research funding. As one of the seven professional schools that make up the University of Maryland, Baltimore campus, the School of Medicine has a total population of nearly 9,000 faculty and staff, including 2,500 students, trainees, residents, and fellows. The combined School of Medicine and Medical System (“University of Maryland Medicine”) has an annual budget of over $6 billion and an economic impact of nearly $20 billion on the state and local community. The School of Medicine, which ranks as the 8th highest among public medical schools in research productivity (according to the Association of American Medical Colleges profile) is an innovator in translational medicine, with 606 active patents and 52 start-up companies. In the latest U.S. News & World Report ranking of the Best Medical Schools, published in 2021, the UM School of Medicine is ranked #9 among the 92 public medical schools in the U.S., and in the top 15 percent (#27) of all 192 public and private U.S. medical schools. The School of Medicine works locally, nationally, and globally, with research and treatment facilities in 36 countries around the world. Visit medschool.umaryland.edu
JOURNAL
Molecular Psychiatry
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Experimental study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Animals
ARTICLE TITLE
A genetic basis for friendship? Homophily for membrane-associated PDE11A-cAMP-CREB signaling in CA1 of hippocampus dictates mutual social preference in male and female mice.
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
28-Jul-2021
COI STATEMENT
The authors have no conflicts to declare.
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