Trait inferences from the “big two” produce gendered expectations of facial features

Abstract

Prescriptive stereotypes based on, respectively, agency and communality reflect how people expect men and women to behave. Deviating from such prescriptions limits opportunities for men and women in ways that reinforce traditional gender roles. In the current work, we examine whether people have expectations of gendered facial features based on agentic and communal descriptions of targets and if these expectations extend to who people think is best suited for workplace tasks. Across five experiments, people expected more facial masculinity for targets paired with agentic relative to communal traits (Experiments 1, 2a-b) and workplace behaviors (Experiments 3a-b). This expectation effect emerged when gendered facial features (e.g., more masculinized and feminized versions of face identities) were manipulated across (Experiment 1) and within (Experiments 2a-b, 3a-b) gender, regardless of whether traits were explicitly stated (Experiments 1, 2a-b, 3a) or inferred (Experiment 3b), and regardless of trait valence. When people made decisions about two same-gender faces, the gender of those faces accentuated trait effects. More masculine male (relative to female) faces were consistently expected more for agentic traits and workplace tasks, but consistently expected less for communal traits and workplace tasks (Experiments 2a, 3a-b). We then conceptually replicated expectation effects by showing that mental representations of agentic and communal faces appear correspondingly gendered (Experiment 4). Finally, we provide exploratory analyses showing that expectation effects may differentially vary by perceiver gender across contexts. These findings illustrate a non-verbal route by which people make decisions based on gender stereotypes that have wide-ranging implications for workplace behavior.