Perception of Faces and Elaboration of Gender and Victim/Aggressor Stereotypes: The Influence of Internet Use and of the Perceiver’s Personality

Abstract

The use of social media, particularly among youngsters, is characterized by simple and fast image exploration, mostly of people, particularly faces. The study presented here was conducted in order to investigate stereotypical judgments about men and women concerning past events of aggression—perpetrated or suffered—expressed on the basis of their faces, and gender-related differences in the judgments. To this aim, 185 participants answered a structured questionnaire online. The questionnaire contained 30 photos of young people’s faces, 15 men and 15 women (Ma et al., 2015), selected on the basis of the neutrality of their expression, and participants were asked to rate each face with respect to masculinity/femininity, strength/weakness, and having a past of aggression, as a victim or as a perpetrator. Information about the empathic abilities and personality traits of participants were also collected. The results indicate that the stereotypes—both of gender and those of victims and perpetrators—emerge as a consequence of the visual exploration of faces that present no facial emotion. Some characteristics of the personality of the observers, such as neuroticism, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, and affective empathy, have a role in facilitating or hindering stereotype processing, in different ways for male and female faces by male and female observers. In particular, both genders attribute their positive stereotypical attributes to same-gender faces: men see male faces as stronger, masculine, and more aggressive than women do, and women see female faces as more feminine, less weak, and less as victims than men do. Intensive use of social media emerges as a factor that could facilitate the expression of some stereotypes of violent experiences and considering female subjects as more aggressive. Findings in this study can contribute to research on aggressive behavior on the Internet and improve our understanding of the multiple factors involved in the elaboration of gender stereotypes relative to violent or victim behavior.

The Shape of Our Bias: Perceived Age and Gender in the Humanoid Robots of the ABOT Database

“…Another thorny issue around the perception of age and gender in humanoid robots regards how these categories change the robot's perceived moral status and accountability. As of today, we do not know if a childlike robot is given the same moral status of an adultlike robot nor if it is held morally accountable for its actions in a different way [46], [47]. Moreover, we do not know if feminine and childlike robots are more likely to be abused (e.g., bullying [48]).…”

Gender role stereotypes at work in humanoid robots

“…It appears, in fact, that in addition to the distinction between male and female roles, which are in line with what is expected, there is a tendency for men to consider some male roles as more specifically masculine. Women, on the other hand, show more attenuated stereotypes for those roles that males consider very masculine (mowing the lawn and shovelling the snow) (RQ1) (McHale, Crouter, and Tucker 1999;Crouter et al 2007;Bracci et al 2021).…”

“…Generally, these two hypotheses have been evaluated through analyses that mainly focused on aspects such as personality traits (Costa, Terracciano, and McCrae 2001), attitudes (Maccoby and Jacklin 1974;Else-Quest, Hyde, and Linn 2010;Breda and Napp 2019) and cognitive abilities (Hedges and Nowell 1995;Rideout, Foehr, and Roberts 2010). But other aspects have also been considered, such as the willingness to enact different types of aggressive behaviours (Crick and Grotpeter 1995), or the attribution of past aggression perpetrated or received (Bracci et al 2021).…”