Watkins Christopher D, Xiao Dengke, Perrett David I
Division of Psychology, School of Applied Sciences, Abertay University, Dundee, United Kingdom.
School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, United Kingdom.
Front Psychol. 2020 Jan 14;10:2996. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02996. eCollection 2019.
While first impressions of dominance and competence can influence leadership preference, social transmission of leadership preference has received little attention. The capacity to transmit, store and compute information has increased greatly over recent history, and the new media environment may encourage partisanship (i.e., "echo chambers"), misinformation and rumor spreading to support political and social causes and be conducive both to emotive writing and emotional contagion, which may shape voting behavior. In our pre-registered experiment, we examined whether implicit associations between facial cues to dominance and competence (intelligence) and leadership ability are strengthened by partisan media and knowledge that leaders support or oppose us on a socio-political issue of personal importance. Social information, in general, reduced well-established implicit associations between facial cues and leadership ability. However, as predicted, social knowledge of group membership reduced preferences for facial cues to high dominance and intelligence in out-group leaders. In the opposite-direction to our original prediction, this "in-group bias" was greater under partisan versus partisan media, with partisan writing eliciting greater state anxiety across the sample. Partisanship also altered the salience of women's facial appearance (i.e., cues to high dominance and intelligence) in out-group versus in-group leaders. Independent of the media environment, men and women displayed an in-group bias toward facial cues of dominance in same-sex leaders. Our findings reveal effects of minimal social information (facial appearance, group membership, media reporting) on leadership judgments, which may have implications for patterns of voting or socio-political behavior at the local or national level.
虽然对支配力和能力的第一印象会影响对领导者的偏好，但领导者偏好的社会传播却很少受到关注。在近代历史上，信息的传输、存储和计算能力有了极大提高，新媒体环境可能会助长党派偏见（即“回声室效应”）、错误信息和谣言传播，以支持政治和社会事业，并且有利于情感化写作和情绪感染，这可能会影响投票行为。在我们预先注册的实验中，我们研究了党派媒体以及领导者在个人重要的社会政治问题上支持或反对我们的信息，是否会强化面部线索所传达的支配力和能力（智力）与领导能力之间的隐性关联。一般来说，社会信息会削弱面部线索与领导能力之间已确立的隐性关联。然而，正如所预测的那样，群体成员身份的社会认知会降低对外群体领导者面部线索所传达的高支配力和高智力的偏好。与我们最初的预测相反，这种“内群体偏见”在党派媒体与非党派媒体的对比中更为明显，党派性写作在整个样本中引发了更大的状态焦虑。党派性还改变了外群体与内群体领导者中女性面部特征（即高支配力和高智力的线索）的显著性。无论媒体环境如何男女性都对同性领导者面部线索所传达的支配力表现出内群体偏见。我们的研究结果揭示了最少的社会信息（面部特征、群体成员身份、媒体报道）对领导力判断的影响，这可能会对地方或国家层面的投票模式或社会政治行为产生影响。
