Misha Ali

October 23, 2015

At Face Value: Behavioral Responses to Facial Disfigurement

Evaluating faces is an integral part of social interaction. Faces are often the first thing we notice about people and the basis on which we form our first impressions of them. There is a documented tendency for people to avoid facially disfigured individuals and to discriminate against them in professional and academic settings. At the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, I studied the bases of people's negative responses to craniofacial disfigurement. We built a corpus database of individuals with facial disfigurement before and after they received surgery to alter the disfigurement. We asked people to make inferences about the individuals using semantic differential scales (is this person unfriendly vs friendly?). Overall, we found a large bias against facially disfigured individuals. Of the 31 traits we tested, 28 showed significantly more negative responses to pre-surgery vs post-surgery individuals. These traits included trustworthiness, intelligence, competence, neuroticism, honesty, confidence and conscientiousness. These differences in perception could lead to discrimination in professional settings, in which facially disfigured individuals may be viewed less competent and reliable than their non-disfigured counterparts, as well as academic settings, in which facially disfigured students may be considered less intelligent and less hard-working than their non-disfigured classmates.