Social class meaningfully impacts individuals' life outcomes and daily interactions, and the mere perception of one's socioeconomic standing can have significant ramifications. To better understand how people infer others' social class, we therefore tested the legibility of class (operationalized as monetary income) from facial images, finding across 4 participant samples and 2 stimulus sets that perceivers categorized the faces of rich and poor targets significantly better than chance. Further investigation showed that perceivers categorize social class using minimal facial cues and employ a variety of stereotype-related impressions to make their judgments. Of these, attractiveness accurately cued higher social class in self-selected dating profile photos. However, only the stereotype that well-being positively relates to wealth served as a valid cue in neutral faces. Indeed, neutrally posed rich targets displayed more positive affect relative to poor targets and perceivers used this affective information to categorize their social class. Impressions of social class from these facial cues also influenced participants' evaluations of the targets' employability, demonstrating that face-based perceptions of social class may have important downstream consequences. (PsycINFO Database Record

Theories linking the literatures on stereotyping and human resource management have proposed that individuals may enjoy greater success obtaining jobs congruent with stereotypes about their social categories or traits. Here, we explored such effects for a detectable, but not obvious, social group distinction: male sexual orientation. Bridging previous work on prejudice and occupational success with that on social perception, we found that perceivers rated gay and straight men as more suited to professions consistent with stereotypes about their groups (nurses, pediatricians, and English teachers vs. engineers, managers, surgeons, and math teachers) from mere photos of their faces. Notably, distinct evaluations of the gay and straight men emerged based on perceptions of their faces with no explicit indication of sexual orientation. Neither perceivers' expertise with hiring decisions nor diagnostic information about the targets eliminated these biases, but encouraging fair decisions did contribute to partly ameliorating the differences. Mediation analysis further showed that perceptions of the targets' sexual orientations and facial affect accounted for these effects. Individuals may therefore infer characteristics about individuals' group memberships from their faces and use this information in a way that meaningfully influences evaluations of their suitability for particular jobs. (PsycINFO Database Record

No abstract

Heterosexual individuals tend to look and act more typical for their gender compared to gay and lesbian individuals, and people use this information to infer sexual orientation. Consistent with stereotypes associating happy expressions with femininity, previous work found that gay men displayed more happiness than straight men—a difference that perceivers used, independent of gender typicality, to judge sexual orientation. Here, we extended this to judgments of women’s sexual orientation. Like the gender-inversion stereotypes applied to men, participants perceived women’s faces manipulated to look angry as more likely to be lesbians; however, emotional expressions largely did not distinguish the faces of actual lesbian and straight women. Compared to men’s faces, women’s faces varied less in their emotional expression (appearing invariably positive) but varied more in gender typicality. These differences align with gender role expectations requiring the expression of positive emotion by women and prohibiting the expression of femininity by men. More important, greater variance within gender typicality and emotion facilitates their respective utility for distinguishing sexual orientation from facial appearance. These findings thus provide the first evidence for contrasting cues to women’s and men’s sexual orientation and suggest that gender norms may uniquely shape how men and women reveal their sexual orientation.