Face masks have a limited influence on first impressions: evidence from three experiments
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Considering the widespread use of face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, the goal of the current study was to examine how occlusion of the lower half of the face may impact first impression formation. We conducted three experiments, each building on previous research, investigating the effect of face masks on first impressions of faces across the lifespan (children, young and older adults). Experiment 1 examined whether the mandatory influence of happy facial expressions on perceived trustworthiness in young adult faces is influenced by face masks. Experiment 2 examined behavioural consequences of adults' first impressions of child faces to determine whether masks reduce the effect of facial niceness on interpretations of ambiguous behaviour. Experiment 3 investigated consensus for first impressions of trustworthiness and competence in older adult faces with and without masks, as well as consensus on underlying facial cues. The results of all three experiments present converging evidence that masks do not have a significant impact on first impressions and their behavioural consequences.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.045 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it