Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2021 Apr 8;16(4):e0249782. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0249782. eCollection 2021.
People make judgments of others based on appearance, and these inferences can affect social interactions. Although the importance of facial appearance in these judgments is well established, the impact of the body morphology remains unclear. Specifically, it is unknown whether experimentally varied body morphology has an impact on perception of threat in others. In two preregistered experiments (N = 250), participants made judgments of perceived threat of body stimuli of varying morphology, both in the absence (Experiment 1) and presence (Experiment 2) of facial information. Bodies were perceived as more threatening as they increased in mass with added musculature and portliness, and less threatening as they increased in emaciation. The impact of musculature endured even in the presence of faces, although faces contributed more to the overall threat judgment. The relative contributions of the faces and bodies seemed to be driven by discordance, such that threatening faces exerted the most influence when paired with non-threatening bodies, and vice versa. This suggests that the faces and bodies were not perceived as entirely independent and separate components. Overall, these findings suggest that body morphology plays an important role in perceived threat and may bias real-world judgments.
人们根据外貌对他人做出判断，这些推断会影响社交互动。尽管面部外观在这些判断中的重要性已得到充分证实，但身体形态的影响仍不清楚。具体来说，尚不清楚实验中改变的身体形态是否会影响对他人的威胁感知。在两项预先注册的实验中（N=250），参与者对不同形态的身体刺激做出了威胁感知判断，既有（实验 1）也有无（实验 2）面部信息。当身体增加肌肉量和肥胖度时，会被认为更具威胁性，而当身体变得消瘦时，会被认为威胁性更小。即使有面部信息存在，肌肉量的影响仍然存在，尽管面部信息对整体威胁判断的贡献更大。面部和身体的相对贡献似乎是由不和谐驱动的，例如，当威胁性的面部与非威胁性的身体搭配时，会产生最大的影响，反之亦然。这表明面部和身体并不是被视为完全独立和分开的部分。总的来说，这些发现表明身体形态在感知威胁方面起着重要作用，并可能影响现实世界的判断。
