Ambiguous Face Read As Male If You Squeeze A Hard Ball
Christopher Philip
Embodiment is a promising area of research into nonverbal communication. Embodied cognition, the tie between our mind and our bodies shows that much of how we think is “grounded” in the physical world, and not simply a construct of our minds.
For example, previous research has shown that using a “precision grip” by holding the fingers slightly apart or holding the hand tightly in a “power grip,” activates thoughts about grapes and hammers.
Turns out, much about our thought is grounded in our physical body and our environment.
Research lead by Michael Slepian, Tufts University, designed a study to examine whether the same motor processes would be activated during a gender discrimination task. This was born out of the fact that many previous studies have shown that metaphor works in such a way as to represent how our brain handles certain realities. For example, in one research study, the mass of a clipboard has been shown to “weigh” on the importance of an issue, such that those who held the heavier clipboard judged it to be more important than a lighter one.
Other studies have shown that thinking into the future causes people to lean forward, rather than backwards, moral purity primes the desire for hand washing, and social isolation produces lower skin temperatures.
The current study aimed to test whether gender would be affected by the relative hardness of an object – a ball. Specifically, people associate hardness with male, and softness with female (or tough versus tender), so the researchers assumed that ambiguous faces would be judged more male than female if the ball was hard, rather than soft. If this was the case, then gender would prove to be grounded in the idea of hard versus soft.
The study consistent of two parts and were simple in their construct.
In the first study, subjects categorize 8 ambiguous faces as either male of female.
While viewing and judging the faces, the subjects handled either a soft polyurethane-foam stress ball or a hard ball made of latex filled with millet. During the experiment, subjects were instructed to continuously squeeze the ball. The faces were produced with the help of software such that they had equal proportions of male and female qualities.
The researchers expected the subjects to view the ambiguous faces more as male when squeezing the hard ball, and conversely, to view the same faces as more female when squeezing the softball – and this is precisely what they found.
In the second experiment, subjects categorized the same set of images for their sex as the first experiment, only this time they were presented printed on a piece of paper. The subjects were given two sheets of paper separated by a sheet of carbon paper. One set of subjects were told to circle the female faces more softly with a pencil so that the experimenters could “reuse the paper.” This primed the subjects with the idea that female faces should be circled softly. The other set of subjects were told to press hard when circle the faces, priming them for hardness.
As predicted, subjects tended to circle more faces as male when pressing hard then when instructed to press softly.
Over two experiments, squeezing a soft ball or pressing softly on paper, over squeezing a hard ball or pressing hard on paper, biased gender categorization toward “female.”
Implications Of Hardness And Softness
The hardness and softness is one of the fundamental categories by which we place men and women. However, by understanding the priming or groundedness of our beliefs, we can begin to understand how pressure affects how we think about other people.
Tasks as seemingly benign as tapping on a soft or hard keyboard, pressing on an automobile accelerator, exercising with high force, the relative strength of a handshake, or the overall physical attributes of a male versus female body can affect how we process ideas related to them.
It is the concepts of embodied cognition that gives us not only a framework to scaffold our ideas upon, but also gives us inherent bias that influences our decisions. The nonverbal channel with respect to the research says that our environment predicts certain judgments about others based on factors that aren’t always particularly objective.
Resources
Slepian, Michael L.; Max Weisbuch; Nicholas O. Rule; and Nalini Ambady. Tough And Tender: Embodied Categorization of Gender. Psychological Science. 2019. 22(1): 26-
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