Nalini Ambady's research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places
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Publications (203)
The current research investigates people's perceptions of others' lay theories (or mindsets), an understudied construct that we call meta-lay theories. Six studies examine whether underrepresented students' meta-lay theories influence their sense of belonging to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The studies tested whether underrepr...
Observing shifts in others’ eye gaze causes perceivers to shift their own attention in the same direction, and such gaze following has been regarded as reflexive. We hypothesized that effects of social hierarchy on reflexive gaze following are driven largely by power asymmetries. We used a standard gaze-cuing paradigm with 100 and 300 ms stimulus o...
People belong to multiple social groups, which may have conflicting stereotypic associations. A manager evaluating an Asian woman for a computer programming job could be influenced by negative gender stereotypes or by positive racial stereotypes. We hypothesized that evaluations of job candidates can depend upon what social group is more salient, e...
Observers frequently form impressions of other people based on complex or conflicting information. Rather than being objective, these impressions are often biased by observers' motives. For instance, observers often downplay negative information they learn about ingroup members. Here, we characterize the neural systems associated with biased impres...
Trust and cooperation often break down across group boundaries, contributing to pernicious consequences, from polarized political structures to intractable conflict. As such, addressing such conflicts requires first understanding why trust is reduced in intergroup settings. Here, we clarify the structure of intergroup trust using neuroscientific an...
Theories linking the literatures on stereotyping and human resource management have proposed that individuals may enjoy greater success obtaining jobs congruent with stereotypes about their social categories or traits. Here, we explored such effects for a detectable, but not obvious, social group distinction: male sexual orientation. Bridging previ...
Beliefs about the malleability versus stability of traits (incremental vs. entity lay theories) have a profound impact on social cognition and self-regulation, shaping phenomena that range from the fundamental attribution error and group-based stereotyping to academic motivation and achievement. Less is known about the causes than the effects of th...
Franklin, Stevenson, Ambady, and Adams observe that there is little cross-cultural research in the ability to perceive information (emotion, cognitions, etc.) from the eyes of an individual. The authors argue that the eyes play a major role in social interaction and looking at within- and between-culture use of information from the eyes, what is re...
Power is accompanied by a sense of entitlement, which shapes reactions to self-relevant injustices. We propose that powerful people more strongly expect to be treated fairly and are faster to perceive unjust treatment that violates these expectations. After preliminary data demonstrated that power leads people to expect fair outcomes for themselves...
The present study asks how subliminal exposure to negative stereotypes about age-related memory deficits affects older adults’ memory performance. Whereas prior research has focused on the effect of “stereotype threat” on older adults’ memory for neutral material, the present study additionally examines the effect on memory for positive and negativ...
Across 7 studies, the authors examined the relationship between experiences of verticality and abstract versus concrete processing. Experiencing high, relative to low, verticality led to higher level identifications for actions (Study 1), greater willingness to delay short-term monetary gains for larger long-term monetary gains (Studies 2 and 5), a...
An enormous amount of research on person perception exists. This literature documents how people form impressions of one another and how these impressions influence behavior. However, this literature surprisingly has not been extended to people perception—how people visually perceive and judge groups (e.g., teams, classrooms, boards, crowds) rather...
The fifth edition of a work that defines the field of cognitive neuroscience, with entirely new material that reflects recent advances in the field. Each edition of this classic reference has proved to be a benchmark in the developing field of cognitive neuroscience. The fifth edition of The Cognitive Neurosciences continues to chart new directions...
Although people form impressions of others with ease, sometimes one's initial perceptions of individuals conflict with what one knows about them. Here, we aimed to investigate the process by which explicit knowledge about people interacts with initial perceptions on the basis of cues from facial appearance. Participants memorized the sexual orienta...
Knowledge of individuals' group membership can alter moral judgments of their behavior. We found that such moral judgments were amplified when judgers learned that a person belonged to a group shown to elicit disgust in others. When a person was labeled as obese, a hippie, or "trailer trash," people judged that person's behavior differently than wh...
Young adults can be surprisingly accurate at making inferences about people from their faces. Although these first impressions have important consequences for both the perceiver and the target, it remains an open question whether first impression accuracy is preserved with age. Specifically, could age differences in impressions toward others stem f...
People with facial paralysis (FP) report social difficulties, but some attempt to compensate by increasing expressivity in their bodies and voices. We examined perceivers’ emotion judgments of videos of people with FP to understand how they interpret the combination of an inexpressive face with an expressive body and voice. Results suggest perceive...
Children prefer learning from, and affiliating with, their racial ingroup but those preferences may vary for biracial children. Monoracial (White, Black, Asian) and biracial (Black/White, Asian/White) children (N=246, 3-8 years) had their racial identity primed. In a learning preferences task, participants determined the function of a novel object...
Early perceptual operations are central components of the dynamics of social categorization. The wealth of information provided by facial cues presents challenges to our understanding of these early stages of person perception. The current study aimed to uncover the dynamics of processing multiply categorizable faces, notably as a function of their...
What is said when communicating intergroup support to targets of prejudice, and how do targets react? We hypothesized that people not targeted by prejudice reference social connection (e.g., social support) more than social change (e.g., calling for a reduction in prejudice) in their supportive messages. However, we hypothesized that targets of pre...
Clinicians make a variety of assessments about their clients, from judging personality traits to making diagnoses, and a variety of methods are available to do so, ranging from observations to structured interviews. A large body of work demonstrates that from a brief glimpse of another's nonverbal behavior, a variety of traits and inner states can...
The threat of being negatively stereotyped in mathematics can impair the performance of women on difficult math tests, a phenomenon referred to as stereotype threat (ST). This phenomenon may help to explain why there are fewer women than men pursuing and succeeding in scientific careers. Although ST effects have emerged repeatedly in studies with c...
There is now robust evidence that activating negative stereotypes can hinder the test performance of adults. Far less is known, however, about when children become susceptible to these effects. In the present study we examined the impact of a brief race salience manipulation on the test performance of African-American and European-American children...
Embodied cognition theory proposes that individuals' abstract concepts can be associated with sensorimotor processes. The authors examined the effects of teaching participants novel embodied metaphors, not based in prior physical experience, and found evidence suggesting that they lead to embodied simulation, suggesting refinements to current model...
On catching sight of another's face, multiple social categories may be potentially extracted. Prior work has often found that one category (e.g., sex) comes to dominate perception at the expense of others (e.g., race) being ignored. In the present study, participants categorized a face's sex or race by tapping a response with their finger. While th...
The authors examined whether biracial (Black/White) individuals, who have access to multiple racial identities and experience with both Black and White faces, would be able to adopt the perceptual lens of a contextually salient racial identity. Biracial and monoracial perceivers wrote an essay about a time they connected with their mother's or fath...
Rigid social categorization can lead to negative social consequences such as stereotyping and prejudice. The authors hypothesized that bodily experiences of fluidity would promote fluidity in social-categorical thinking. Across a series of experiments, fluid movements compared with nonfluid movements led to more fluid lay theories of social categor...
A voluminous literature has examined how primates respond to nonverbal expressions of status, such as taking the high ground, expanding one's posture, and tilting one's head. We extend this research to human intergroup processes in general and interracial processes in particular. Perceivers may be sensitive to whether racial group status is reflect...
From only brief exposure to a face, individuals spontaneously categorize another's race. Recent behavioral evidence suggests
that visual context may affect such categorizations. We used fMRI to examine the neural basis of contextual influences on
the race categorization of faces. Participants categorized the race of faces that varied along a White-...
People from racial minority backgrounds report less trust in their doctors and have poorer health outcomes. Although these deficiencies have multiple roots, one important set of explanations involves racial bias, which may be non-conscious, on the part of providers, and minority patients' fears that they will be treated in a biased way. Here, we fo...
Past research shows that adults often display poor memory for racially ambiguous and racial outgroup faces, with both face types remembered worse than own-race faces. In the present study, the authors examined whether children also show this pattern of results. They also examined whether emerging essentialist thinking about race predicts children's...
Emotional expressions convey important social information. Given the social importance of decoding emotions, expressive faces wield great influence on cognition and perception. However, contextual factors also exert a top-down influence on emotion detection, privileging particular expressions over others. The current research investigates how the p...
In two studies we investigate how the fluid identities of biracial individuals interact with contextual factors to shape behavior in interracial settings. In Study 1, biracial Black/White participants (n = 22) were primed with either their Black or White identity before having a race-related discussion with a Black confederate. Study 2 (n = 34) ass...
Recent work demonstrates that harboring secrets influences perceptual judgments and actions. Individuals carrying secrets make judgments consistent with the experience of being weighed down, such as judging a hill as steeper and judging distances to be farther. In the present article, two studies examined whether revealing a secret would relieve th...
How do individuals who switch between opposing sides develop a sense of commitment to their new groups? Study 1 examined these dynamics in a live-action tag game known as Humans versus Zombies, in which players transitioned from being Human to being Zombie, thus turning against their former fellow Humans. Study 2 examined data from professional bas...
Social categorization is often thought to be based on facial features and immune to visual context. Moreover, East Asians have been argued to attend to context more than Westerners. American and Chinese participants were presented with faces varying along a White-Asian morph continuum either in American, neutral, or Chinese contexts. American conte...
In this review, we highlight the importance of understanding diversity ideologies, or people's beliefs and practices regarding diversity, for social psychological research on intergroup relations. This review focuses on two diversity ideologies, colorblindness and multiculturalism, and their impact on core issues related to intergroup conflict, suc...
Perceivers' inferences about individuals based on their faces often show high interrater consensus and can even accurately predict behavior in some domains. Here we investigated the consensus and accuracy of judgments of trustworthiness. In Study 1, we showed that the type of photo judged makes a significant difference for whether an individual is...
Memory and interest respond in similar ways to people's shifting needs and motivations. We therefore tested whether memory and interest might produce similar, observable patterns in people's responses over time. Specifically, the present studies examined whether fluctuations in widespread interest (as measured by Internet search trends) resemble tw...
Dominance is one of the most ecologically important social traits that humans express and perceive. Here, we examined perceivers' capacity to judge dominance under physical and temporal constraints. In study 1, dominant, neutral, and submissive poses of otherwise non-expressive faces and impoverished facial outlines were judged after exposure for 2...
Research is increasingly challenging the claim that distinct sources of social information-such as sex, race, and emotion-are processed in discrete fashion. Instead, there appear to be functionally relevant interactions that occur. In the present article, we describe research examining how cues conveyed by the human face, voice, and body interact t...
Social-categorical knowledge is partially grounded in proprioception. In Study 1, participants describing "hard" and "soft" politicians, and "hard" and "soft" scientists used different "hard" and "soft" traits for the two groups, suggesting that the meaning of these traits is context specific. Studies 2 to 4 showed that both meanings were supported...
In three studies, we examined the effects of racial diversity on gender dynamics in small mixed-sex groups. In all-White groups in Study 1, White men spoke significantly more than White women and were rated as more persuasive; however, in racially-diverse groups, White women and White men spent equal amounts of time speaking and were rated as equal...
Inferences of others' social traits from their faces can influence how we think and behave towards them, but little is known about how perceptions of people's traits may affect downstream cognitions, such as memory. Here we explored the relationship between targets' perceived social traits and how well they were remembered following a single brief...
Social networking sites such as Facebook represent a unique and dynamic social environment.
This study addresses three theoretical issues in personality psychology in the context of online social networking sites: (a) the temporal consistency of Facebook activity, (b) people's awareness of their online behavior, and (c) comparison of social behavio...
The current study examines the effect of status information on the neural substrates of person perception. In an event-related fMRI experiment, participants were presented with photographs of faces preceded with information denoting either: low or high financial status (e.g., "earns $25,000" or "earns $350,000"), or low or high moral status (e.g.,...
The aim of this review is to highlight an emerging field: the neuroscience of culture. This new field links cross-cultural psychology with cognitive neuroscience across fundamental domains of cognitive and social psychology. We present a summary of studies on emotion, perspective-taking, memory, object perception, attention, language, and the self,...
Motor movements that embody approach and avoidance shape individuals' affective and evaluative responses to objects. In two studies we investigate how approach and avoidance impact participants' judgments of ecologically valid targets: other humans. One trait relevant to the approach or avoidance of other humans is trustworthiness. Trustworthy peop...
The manner in which disparate affective responses shape attitudes toward other individuals has received a great deal of attention
in neuroscience research. However, the malleability of these affective responses remains largely unexplored. The perceived
controllability of a stigma (whether or not the bearer of the stigma is perceived as being respon...
The present work examined whether secrets are experienced as physical burdens, thereby influencing perception and action. Four studies examined the behavior of people who harbored important secrets, such as secrets concerning infidelity and sexual orientation. People who recalled, were preoccupied with, or suppressed an important secret estimated h...
Cognitive scientists describe creativity as fluid thought. Drawing from findings on gesture and embodied cognition, we hypothesized that the physical experience of fluidity, relative to nonfluidity, would lead to more fluid, creative thought. Across 3 experiments, fluid arm movement led to enhanced creativity in 3 domains: creative generation, cogn...
Although the effects of negative stereotypes and observer pressure on athletic performance have been well researched, the effects of positive stereotypes on performance, particularly in the presence of observers, is not known. In the current study, White males watched a video either depicting Whites basketball players as the best free throwers in t...
Although there has been little research on the adaptive behavior of people with congenital compared to acquired disability, there is reason to predict that people with congenital conditions may be better adapted because they have lived with their conditions for their entire lives (Smart, 2008). We examined whether people with congenital facial para...
Facial expressions have communicative properties that bear some importance to perceivers. Such expressions are informative with respect to the future behavior of the expressing individual and with respect to the conditions of the broader social environment. This article argues that appropriate responses to facial expressions are an important means...
Evidence suggests that people are often surprisingly accurate when making judgments of others based on mere glimpses. In particular, nonverbal channels of communication- including facial displays, gestures, and tone of voice-are extremely revealing, in that they spontaneously emit clues to the true feelings and qualities of an individual. This chap...
Facebook profiles are routinely viewed and judged by others. We examined the categories of information that are utilized by observers and we tested the predictive validity of personality ratings based on Facebook Info pages. Raters made personality judgments of target individuals, either based on full Facebook Info pages or single categories of inf...
Research suggests that attention is attracted to evolutionary threats (e.g., snakes) due to an evolved "fear-module" that automatically detects biological threats to survival. However, recent evidence indicates that non-evolutionary threats (e.g., guns) capture and hold attention as well, suggesting a more general "threat-relevance" mechanism that...
Recent evidence shows that gender modulates the morphology of facial expressions and might thus alter the meaning of those expressions. Consequently, we hypothesized that gender would moderate the relationship between facial expressions and the perception of direct gaze. In Study 1, participants viewed male and female faces exhibiting joy, anger, f...
To reconcile empirical inconsistencies in the relationship between emotionally-negative families and daughters' abnormal eating, we hypothesized a critical moderating variable: daughters' vulnerability to emotion contagion.
A nonclinical sample of undergraduate females (N = 92) was recruited via an advertisement and completed self-report measures v...
This meta-analysis examined over 40 years of research on interracial interactions by exploring 4 types of outcomes: explicit attitudes toward interaction partners, participants' self-reports of their own emotional state, nonverbal or observed behavior, and objective measures of performance. Data were collected from 108 samples (N = 12,463) comparin...
Across cultures, people tend to show high agreement in their impressions of others. But do these impressions predict external outcomes? Here we tested the predictive validity of trait judgments of the faces of Japanese and American targets, as rated by Japanese and American perceivers. Participants rated the faces of Japanese and American Chief Exe...
Another version of the computational model used, which contains a more complex arrangement of between-node connections. The simpler model shown in Fig. 4 was adopted for parsimony.
(TIF)
It is commonly believed that race is perceived through another's facial features, such as skin color. In the present research, we demonstrate that cues to social status that often surround a face systematically change the perception of its race. Participants categorized the race of faces that varied along White-Black morph continua and that were pr...
The current study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine whether regulating negative bias to stigmatized individuals has a unique neural activity profile from general emotion regulation. Participants were presented with images of stigmatized (e.g. homeless people) or non-stigmatized (e.g. a man holding a gun) social targets wh...
Alcohol identity is the extent to which an individual perceives drinking alcohol to be a defining characteristic of his or her self-identity. Although alcohol identity might play an important role in risky college drinking practices, there is currently no easily administered, implicit measure of this concept. Therefore we developed a computerized i...
In three experiments, the authors investigated the effects of sadness on the desire for social connectedness. They hypothesized that sadness serves an adaptive function by motivating people to reach out to others and preferentially attend to information related to one's current level of social connectedness, but only when it is instigated by social...
Across cultures, people converge in some behaviors and diverge in others. As little is known about the accuracy of judgments across cultures outside of the domain of emotion recognition, the present study investigated the influence of culture in another area: the social categorization of men's sexual orientations. Participants from nations varying...
First impressions can predict numerous subjective and objective outcomes. Here we show that judgments of the faces of the Managing Partners (MPs) of America's top 100 law firms relate to their firms' success. Participants' ratings of Power (competence, dominance, and facial maturity) from the MPs' faces significantly correlated with the profit marg...
The current study examines the effect of violations of social expectancies on the neural substrates of person perception. In an event-related fMRI experiment, participants were presented with the photographs of either Republican or Democrat politicians paired with either typical Republican or Democrat political views (e.g., "wants a smaller governm...
People can accurately infer others' traits and group memberships across several domains. We examined heterosexual women's accuracy in judging male sexual orientation across the fertility cycle (Study 1) and found that women's accuracy was significantly greater the nearer they were to peak ovulation. In contrast, women's accuracy was not related to...
We examined whether amygdala responses to rapidly presented fear expressions are preferentially tuned to averted vs direct gaze fear and conversely whether responses to more sustained presentations are preferentially tuned to direct vs averted gaze fear. We conducted three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies to test these predictio...
Recent developments in cultural neuroscience have provided insights showing that human brain function can vary along cultural
lines. In the present article, we review the contributions of cultural psychology to the study and understanding of human
cognitive neuroscience by focusing on three key areas of importance: cognition, perception, and emotio...
Although the roles of shape and pigmentation cues in face categorization have been studied in detail, the time-course of their processing has remained elusive. We measured participants' hand movements via the computer mouse en route to male or female responses (gender task) or young or old responses (age task) on the screen. Participants were prese...
Using event-related potentials, we investigated how the brain extracts information from another's face and translates it into relevant action in real time. In Study 1, participants made between-hand sex categorizations of sex-typical and sex-atypical faces. Sex-atypical faces evoked negativity between 250 and 550 ms (N300/N400 effects), reflecting...
Inferences from faces can predict important real-world outcomes. But little is known about the stability of these effects. Here the authors find that inferences of power from photos of the faces of the managing partners of America’s top 100 law firms significantly corresponded to their success as leaders, as measured by the amounts of profits that...
A dynamic interactive theory of person construal is proposed. It assumes that the perception of other people is accomplished by a dynamical system involving continuous interaction between social categories, stereotypes, high-level cognitive states, and the low-level processing of facial, vocal, and bodily cues. This system permits lower-level senso...
In everyday interactions with others, people have to deal with the sight of a face and sound of a voice at the same time. How the perceptual system brings this information together over hundreds of milliseconds to perceive others remains unclear. In 2 studies, we investigated how facial and vocal cues are integrated during real-time social categori...
As a social identity, religion is unique because it contains a spectrum of choice. In some religious communities, individuals are considered members by virtue of having parents of that background, and religion, culture, and ethnicity are closely intertwined. Other faith communities actively invite people of other backgrounds to join, expecting indi...
Emerging evidence has shown that human thought can be embodied within physical sensations and actions. Indeed, abstract concepts such as morality, time, and interpersonal warmth can be based on metaphors that are grounded in bodily experiences (e.g., physical temperature can signal interpersonal warmth). We hypothesized that social-category knowled...
The human amygdala responds to first impressions of people as judged from their faces, such as normative judgments about the trustworthiness of strangers. It is unknown, however, whether amygdala responses to first impressions can be validated by objective criteria. Here, we examined amygdala responses to faces of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) wh...
The human visual system is particularly attuned to and remarkably efficient at processing social cues. We can effectively "read" others' mental and emotional states and make snap judgments about their characters and dispositions, simply by watching them. Given what is clearly a close relationship between vision and social interaction, it has become...
What are the neural processes involved in perceiving out-groups? The pace of inquiry into this topic has picked up considerably since the pioneering neuroimaging studies conducted in 2000, yielding several insights into the neural processes involved in perceiving, responding to, and regulating responses to out-groups. Chapter 6-8 elegantly synthesi...