An outgroup advantage in discriminating between genuine and posed smiles

Abstract

Ingroup memberships are an important component of the self-concept and people favor their ingroups on a variety of evaluative and behavioral dimensions. Recent research has extended these ingroup favoritism effects to face processing, including an ingroup advantage in emotion identification. The current research was designed to extend these past demonstrations of ingroup favoring biases in face processing to a novel domain: discriminating between genuine and posed smiles. However, across two experiments an unexpected finding emerged: perceivers were better at discriminating between real/fake smiles displayed by outgroup than ingroup members. Experiment 2 also finds that participants are not only more accurate, but also faster to make real/fake judgments for outgroup than ingroup targets. Explanations for these unexpected findings are discussed.

Keywords:

• Group identification
• emotion expressions
• smiles
• minimal groups

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank Christina M. Brown and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Notes

1. Preliminary analyses found no effects of participant factors (race, sex). Similarly, there were no effects of ingroup shape (i.e., whether participants were a circle or square personality). This was the case in both Experiment 1 and 2. All results therefore compare ingroup to outgroup while collapsing across shape and without considering participant sex and race as factors.

2. In addition to examining false alarms, signal detection measures also allow for an examination of response bias through the signal detection metric beta (β). This measure reflects how much evidence participants need before indicating the presence of a signal. A relatively low value on this measure indicates a more lax response criterion (i.e., a greater willingness to indicate a smile is genuine). In Experiment 1 there was a marginal trend for participants to set a lower threshold for detecting ingroup (M = 1.11, SD = .45) than outgroup smiles (M = 1.35, SD = .62), t(39) = −1.84, p = .074. In Experiment 2 the same trend was evident yet non-significant, with lower β for ingroup (M = 1.01, SD = .40) than outgroup (M = 1.15, SD = .53) smiles, t(59) = −1.66, p = .103.