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From a glimpse of a face, people form trait impressions that operate as facial stereotypes, which are largely inaccurate yet nevertheless drive social behavior. Behavioral studies have long pointed to dimensions of trustworthiness and dominance that are thought to underlie face impressions due to their evolutionarily adaptive nature. Using human neuroimaging (N = 26, 19 female, 7 male), we identify a two-dimensional representation of faces’ inferred traits in the middle temporal gyrus (MTG), a region involved in domain-general conceptual processing including the activation of social concepts. The similarity of neural-response patterns for any given pair of faces in the bilateral MTG was predicted by their proximity in trustworthiness–dominance space, an effect that could not be explained by mere visual similarity. This MTG trait-space representation occurred automatically, was relatively invariant across participants, and did not depend on the explicit endorsement of face impressions (i.e., beliefs that face impressions are valid and accurate). In contrast, regions involved in high-level social reasoning (the bilateral temporoparietal junction and posterior superior temporal sulcus; TPJ–pSTS) and entity-specific social knowledge (the left anterior temporal lobe; ATL) also exhibited this trait-space representation but only among participants who explicitly endorsed forming these impressions. Together, the findings identify a two-dimensional neural representation of face impressions and suggest that multiple implicit and explicit mechanisms give rise to biases based on facial appearance. While the MTG implicitly represents a multidimensional trait space for faces, the TPJ–pSTS and ATL are involved in the explicit application of this trait space for social evaluation and behavior. 

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.