A Tiger and a President: Imperceptible Celebrity Facial Cues Influence Trust and Preference

Abstract

Neuroscientific research suggests that the brain has evolved specific capabilities enabling automatic social judgments of others to be made based on facial properties alone. However, little research in marketing has considered the consequences of how facial imagery is automatically processed. We explore automatic perceptions of familiarity by using morphing software to digitally combine unfamiliar faces with those of Tiger Woods and George Bush. Despite a complete lack of conscious recognition, trustworthiness ratings of the composite faces are clearly influenced by the celebrities in question. This appears to be due to implicit recognition being sufficient for individuals to automatically access their own summary valence judgments of either Woods or Bush. Alternative explanations based on a perceptual-fluency account, or implicit recognition sufficient to perceive specific trait ratings, are ruled out. These findings suggest that the marketing practice of digitally manipulating the attractiveness of facial imagery risks overlooking the important influence of familiarity.H uman faces are arguably the most important visual stimuli we perceive. They are quite staggeringly complex and represent an exceptionally rich source of social information, which we have evolved to be extremely adept at decoding (Engell, Haxby, and Todorov 2007). For example, faces not only reveal a tremendous amount of information about our underlying emotions, but the mere adoption of certain facial expressions is sufficient to moderate the underlying physiology and subjective experience of emotion (Ekman 1992). Furthermore, we begin to mimic facial expressions soon after birth (Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson 1993), infer movement traRobin J. Tanner is assistant professor of marketing,

Eye-tracking evidence that happy faces impair verbal message comprehension: the case of health warnings in direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical television commercials

“…This study adds to the current body of research on the processing and impact of facial imagery, this research shows that even subtle facial expressions of characters in advertisements can affect the processing of simultaneously presented auditory information (Small and Verrochi 2009; Tanner and Maeng 2012). The findings show that incongruence in the valence of the visual and the auditory information leads to an increase in cognitive load and poorer understanding of the verbal message.…”

“…For instance, one study found that sad faces on charity advertisements led to more donations in response to the plea in the print advert because the readers felt sadder at the sight of the sad face and were more sympathetic to the cause (Small and Verrochi 2009). Similarly, another study demonstrated that consumers automatically make valenced judgments of composite faces generated from morphed images of likeable or unlikable celebrities, even though they are not aware of the origin of these facial cues (Tanner and Maeng 2012). …”

Social Attributions from Faces: Determinants, Consequences, Accuracy, and Functional Significance

“…Importantly, such learned associations between faces and trait attributions can be generalized to novel faces. Kraus & Chen (2010) have shown that novel faces that resemble the faces of one's significant others are evaluated similarly to those significant others (see also Günaydin et al 2012, Tanner & Maeng 2012. Verosky & Todorov (2010a) have extended these findings.…”

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“…Advertising that "feels right" because it is fluent to process has also been found to be more persuasive (Kim, Rao, and Lee 2009). Seemingly superficial facial cues, such as babyfaceness (Gorn, Jiang, and Johar 2008) or familiar-looking faces (Tanner and Maeng 2012), can also increase perceptions of trustworthiness.…”