Published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers found that people who wear masks tend to be viewed as more socially distant. The findings provide evidence of an implicit association between masked human faces and concepts related to psychological distance.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, several public health measures have been implemented to help contain the spread of the virus, including social distancing, hygiene, and mask wearing. Little is known about how mask wearing affects human social cognition or how people mentally represent masked faces.
Face masks cover about 50-60% of people’s faces, thereby hiding many facial features. There is a challenge for perceivers navigating social situations when encountering someone wearing a face mask when the person relies on facial cues to gauge people’s emotions.
Researchers Ramzi Fatfouta and colleagues were interested in investigating whether masks are associated with psychological distance, such as feeling that someone is socially close or far away from oneself.
Fatfouta and colleagues recruited 354 German-speaking individuals to participate in four experiments that assessed social, spatial, temporal, and hypothetical distance, respectively. In all four experiments, participants completed an Implicit Association Test.
Participants were shown images of either masked or unmasked faces and were instructed to label each image as a “near people” or “distant people” as fast as they could. The order of images was the same for each participant. The visual stimuli consisted of four male and four female pictures with a neutral facial expression, equal attractiveness, and trustworthiness.
Results from this study show that, in all four experiments, participants were quicker to pair masked faces with distance and unmasked faces with close proximity. Participants were slower to match unmasked faces with distance and masked faces with close proximity. “Specifically, the experiments showed that masked faces were associated with distal entities (i.e., distant people, distant events, distant locations, and imaginary creatures) more than proximal entities (i.e., near people, near events, near locations, and real creatures),” the researchers explained.
The results suggest that people who wear face masks are implicitly viewed as being psychologically distant.
Considering previous research shows that ambiguous faces are represented schematically in a top-down manner, Fatfouta and colleagues suggest that people abstract representations of the face when parts of the face become occluded. On the other hand, revealed faces led perceivers to form a concrete representation of the face, which results in a subjective experience that the face is proximal, not distal.
Fatfouta and colleagues suggest that their research shows that wearing masks may be associated with different dimensions of psychological distance. Research shows that people who wear face masks tend to engage in more social distancing behaviors. Face masks may be a cue to others to keep a greater physical distance from them. Mask wearing is also often associated with unlikely or unreal worlds such as “fantasy and fiction”.
The researchers also argue that their findings suggest that incidental cues can influence people’s behavioral processes subconsciously. Furthermore, mask wearing may have undesirable social consequences.
Limitations of this study include the extent to which findings are generalizable, since the studies took place in Germany where the majority of people became accustomed to seeing others wearing masks. It is also unknown whether reactions to seeing other people wear masks reflect newly formed associations. Fatfouta and colleagues indicate that further research is needed to investigate when these implicit associations developed.
The study, “Keeping One’s Distance: Mask Wearing is Implicitly Associated With Psychological Distance“, was authored by Ramzi Fatfouta and Yaacov Trope.