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Initial impressions of others based on facial appearances are often inaccurate yet can lead to dire outcomes. Across four studies, adult participants underwent a counterstereotype training to reduce their reliance on facial appearance in consequential social judgments of White male faces. In Studies 1 and 2, trustworthiness and sentencing judgments among control participants predicted whether real-world inmates were sentenced to death versus life in prison, but these relationships were diminished among trained participants. In Study 3, a sequential priming paradigm demonstrated that the training was able to abolish the relationship between even automatically and implicitly perceived trustworthiness and the inmates’ life-or-death sentences. Study 4 extended these results to realistic decision-making, showing that training reduced the impact of facial trustworthiness on sentencing decisions even in the presence of decision-relevant information. Overall, our findings suggest that a counterstereotype intervention can mitigate the potentially harmful effects of relying on facial appearance in consequential social judgments. 

Facial impressions have long been argued to be driven by two independent dimensions of trustworthiness and dominance. However, in an intergroup context, we reasoned that these dimensions may shift predictably and become more positively related for ingroup members, yet negatively related for outgroup members, due to dominance signaling outgroup threat and/or ingroup prosociality. In two studies, we examined how the two dimensions shift across minimal group boundaries for White targets. In Study 1, core dimensions of trustworthiness and dominance became intertwined with each other differently for ingroup and outgroup targets. In Study 2, stronger stereotypic beliefs that trustworthiness ≈ dominance for ingroup than outgroup mediated the shifts in facial impression dimensions. This work advances our understanding of facial impressions and intergroup bias by showing that the facial impression dimensions are not fixed but may shift across group boundaries and that such shifts occur above and beyond simple ingroup favoritism.