Face-evoked thoughts

TY - JOUR

T1 - Face-evoked thoughts

AU - Zhou, Xingchen

AU - Jenkins, Rob

N1 - Funding Information: This work was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to Rob Jenkins. © 2021 Elsevier B.V. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy.

PY - 2022/1/1

Y1 - 2022/1/1

N2 - The thoughts that come to mind when viewing a face depend partly on the face and partly on the viewer. This basic interaction raises the question of how much common ground there is in face-evoked thoughts, and how this compares to viewers' expectations. Previous analyses have focused on early perceptual stages of face processing. Here we take a more expansive approach that encompasses later associative stages. In Experiment 1 (free association), participants exhibited strong egocentric bias, greatly overestimating the extent to which other people's thoughts resembled their own. In Experiment 2, we show that viewers' familiarity with a face can be decoded from their face-evoked thoughts. In Experiment 3 (person association), participants reported who came to mind when viewing a face—a task that emphasises connections in a social network rather than nodes. Here again, viewers' estimates of common ground exceeded actual common ground by a large margin. We assume that a face elicits much the same thoughts in other people as it does in us, but that is a mistake. In this respect, we are more isolated than we think.

AB - The thoughts that come to mind when viewing a face depend partly on the face and partly on the viewer. This basic interaction raises the question of how much common ground there is in face-evoked thoughts, and how this compares to viewers' expectations. Previous analyses have focused on early perceptual stages of face processing. Here we take a more expansive approach that encompasses later associative stages. In Experiment 1 (free association), participants exhibited strong egocentric bias, greatly overestimating the extent to which other people's thoughts resembled their own. In Experiment 2, we show that viewers' familiarity with a face can be decoded from their face-evoked thoughts. In Experiment 3 (person association), participants reported who came to mind when viewing a face—a task that emphasises connections in a social network rather than nodes. Here again, viewers' estimates of common ground exceeded actual common ground by a large margin. We assume that a face elicits much the same thoughts in other people as it does in us, but that is a mistake. In this respect, we are more isolated than we think.

KW - Egocentric bias

KW - Face perception

KW - False consensus

KW - Metacognition

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85119131262&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104955

DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104955

M3 - Article

C2 - 34798509

AN - SCOPUS:85119131262

VL - 218

JO - Cognition

JF - Cognition

SN - 0010-0277

M1 - 104955

ER -