Changing perceptions of people wearing masks: Two years of living in a pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Despite the widespread use of face masks to combat COVID‐19, little is known about their immediate and delayed social consequences. To understand short‐ and long‐term effects of face masks on interpersonal perception, we measured the evaluation of faces with and without masks at four time points—June 2020, January 2021, September 2021 and June 2022—from the early months of the pandemic in North America to the more recent, and from the implementation of mask mandates to the end of these requirements. Surprisingly, we found that, in general, faces with masks were perceived as more competent, warm, trustworthy, considerate and attractive, but less dominant and anxious than faces without masks. Moreover, differences in attributions of dominance, trustworthiness and warmth between faces with and without masks increased in a linear trend from June 2020 to June 2022. Notably, the impact of masks on perceptions of competence, considerateness, attractiveness and anxiousness did not change over time. We discuss how mask mandates can alter people's social perceptions of others who wear masks compared to those who do not wear masks and how these mandates may influence attributions of some traits more than others through mere exposure and/or social norms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".