A recent study suggests that individual differences can predict how people perceive mask-wearers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings were published in Personality and Individual Differences.
Study authors Antonio Olivera-La Rosa and his team explain how the behavior immune system theory (coined by Schaller and Duncan in 2007) posits that humans avoid others who have physical and behavioral features that signal the presence of disease. The researchers were motivated to explore this theory in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, they wondered whether individual differences in social anxiety, disgust sensitivity, and social trust might predict how people perceive strangers wearing surgical masks.
“We chose to explore participants’ judgments of mask-wearers for two reasons. First, we considered that assessing people’s social perceptions of strangers wearing surgical masks was highly relevant in the context of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Second, past research on face perception suggested that wearing a mask might influence social judgments, by impairing the processing of facial information that is crucial for social trust,” the researchers say.
A study was conducted among 1,054 men and women from several Spanish-speaking countries (87% of the sample were from Columbia). All participants completed an assessment of disgust sensitivity by rating their level of disgust with situations like “accidentally touching a person’s bloody cut.” They also completed measures of social anxiety and social trust.
Next, the participants were either shown a series of strangers’ faces with neutral expressions (control group) or the same faces but with surgical masks photoshopped onto them (experimental group). All participants rated their perception of the trustworthiness and health of each target. They also rated the closest level of interaction they would be comfortable engaging in with this person (e.g. interaction as a friend, co-worker, neighbor, etc.).
As expected, participants with higher disgust scores preferred more social distance and were less likely to trust the target faces in both the masked and unmasked conditions. Similarly, those with social anxiety were less likely to trust targets and more likely to perceive them as ill. Those who scored high in social trust, on the other hand, showed more trustworthiness towards target faces and a lower likelihood of perceiving them as ill.
Interestingly, masked targets were rated as more likely to be ill, yet were rated as more trustworthy and more socially desirable. The authors attempt to reason why subjects were more willing to be close to masked targets when they simultaneously perceived them as more likely to be sick.
“Possibly, judgments of illness function in a more associative manner (surgical mask => COVID-19) than judgments of social desirability and trustworthiness, which may function in a more propositional manner (people wearing a surgical mask are more responsible because they take the new social norms more seriously),” the authors say. They later add, “it might be that people explicitly say that mask-wearers are more trustworthy and socially desirable, but implicitly still mistrust them and feel an impulse to avoid them . . . ”
The authors acknowledge that their findings may not generalize beyond this cultural context.
The study, “Keep your (social) distance: Pathogen concerns and social perception in the time of COVID-19”, was authored by Antonio Olivera-La Rosa, Erick G. Chuquichambi, and Gordon P.D. Ingram.
(Image by Vesna Harni from Pixabay)
