Antony Todorov
Biographic Data
| ID | 382145 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Antony Todorov |
| GIVEN NAMES | Antony |
| FAMILY NAME | Todorov |
| SIGNATURE | TODOROV A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1271-6113 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 67 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 341 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 69 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
A consistent but highly varied androcentric bias in the visual representation of “typical” faces
Decades of research have shown that androcentric bias (i.e., assuming that men represent the default) is prevalent across text, images, and social interactions. Despite this evidence, recent research on the mental imagery of faces shows an opposite of the expected androcentric bias: Mental representations of “typical” faces appear more like women than men. In the present research, we first aim to reconcile this apparent discrepancy by examining t…
Conditions for the (Re)construction of Progressive Left in Bulgaria
The political left in Bulgaria experienced a deep crisis over the last eight years having lost mostly eighty percent of its electorate. The main left-wing party operated an ideological shift to a kind of left nationalism and conservative socialism, trying to recover its support. On the other side there are numerous NGOs, initiatives, media platforms and even think-tanks, small in size, scattered everywhere, which identify themselves as center-lef…
Learning too much from too little
Face stereotypes are prevalent, consequential, yet oftentimes inaccurate. How do false first impressions arise and persist despite counter-evidence? Building on the overgeneralization hypothesis, we propose a domain-general cognitive mechanism: insufficient statistical learning, or Insta-learn. This mechanism posits that humans are quick statistical learners but insufficient samplers. Humans extract statistical regularities from very few exemplar…
Spontaneous Content of Impressions of Naturalistic Face Photographs
Across two studies (N = 4,526), we characterize a taxonomy of spontaneous face impressions by applying artificial intelligence text analyses to thousands of free-response descriptions of computer-generated faces. The taxonomy codes almost 100% of the impressions into Appearance (including Beauty), Sociability, Morality, Ability, Assertiveness, Emotion, Social Group, socioeconomic Status, Uniqueness, Family, Health, Occupation, Geographic origin, …
The sound of emergency
Feature-based encoding of face identity by single neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus
Iterated learning reveals stereotypes of facial trustworthiness that propagate in the absence of evidence
Generative models for visualizing idiosyncratic impressions
In their comprehensive review of research on impressions from faces, Sutherland and Young (this issue) highlight both the remarkable progress and the many challenges facing the field. We focus on two of the challenges: the need for generative, powerful models of impressions and the idiosyncratic nature of complex impressions
Pain and satisfaction
Did you see it? Robust individual differences in the speed with which meaningful visual stimuli break suppression
Learning the affective value of people
From Post-Communism to Post-Democracy
The analysis starts from a key question: how many transformations did post-communism, which came as a promise and project for one transformation, actually carry out? This article is a conceptual, not an event narrative about the transformations of democratization. Its theoretical ambition is threefold. The first aim is to develop a new analytical model for the study of transformations based on the concept of ‘symbolic-ideological hegemony’ and a …
Can we reduce facial biases? Persistent effects of facial trustworthiness on sentencing decisions
Trait impressions from faces influence many consequential decisions even in situations in which decisions should not be based on a person's appearance. Here, we test (a) whether people rely on trait impressions when making legal sentencing decisions and (b) whether two types of interventions—educating decision-makers and changing the accessibility of facial information—reduce the influence of facial stereotypes. We first introduced a novel legal …
Economic status cues from clothes affect perceived competence from faces
Les discours diplomatiques bulgares au sujet de la Russie
L’article examine le lien entre les discours diplomatiques bulgares au sujet de la Russie et le clivage entre russophiles et russophobes dans la société bulgare contemporaine. Ce clivage s’inscrit dans une longue histoire politique du pays depuis l’indépendance et aujourd’hui acquiert une importance particulière à cause de la tension accrue entre la Russie du président Poutine et les alliés occidentaux. Les gouvernements bulgares des dix dernière…
Robust effects of affective person learning on evaluation of faces
People form impressions of others from multiple sources of information. Facial appearance is one such source and judgments based on facial appearance are made after minimal exposure to faces. A more reliable source of information is affective person learning based on others' past actions. Here we investigated whether the effects of such appearance-independent learning on face evaluation emerge after rapid face exposure, a response deadline proced…
Republican Voters Prefer Candidates Who Have Conservative‐Looking Faces
Research shows people share common political facial stereotypes: They associate faces with political ideologies. Moreover, given that many voters rely on party affiliation, political ideology, and appearances to select political candidates, we might expect that political facial stereotypes would sway voting preferences and, by extension, the share of votes going to each candidate in an election. And yet few studies have examined whether having a …
Flexible updating of beliefs in order to forgive
Face Value
Face Value
Face Value
Visualising mental representations
With the introduction of the psychophysical method of reverse correlation, a holy grail of social psychology appears to be within reach – visualising mental representations. Reverse correlation is a data-driven method that yields visual proxies of mental representations, based on judgements of randomly varying stimuli. This review is a primer to an influential reverse correlation approach in which stimuli vary by applying random noise to the pixe…
À quoi sert l’Europe ? Opinion publique et discours officiels en Europe centrale et orientale
L’article explore les visions de l’Europe en Bulgarie et dans les autres pays d’Europe centrale et orientale et juxtapose l’opinion publique et les discours des élites. Ces visions ont leur histoire récente depuis la chute du régime communiste de type soviétique, comme ils sont fondés dans la culture politique et géopolitique des sociétés des pays postcommunistes de l’Europe. L’analyse porte sur les schémas récurrents de la perception de l’Europe…
I care, even after the first impression
The determinants of consciousness of human faces
Fooled by first impressions? Reexamining the diagnostic value of appearance-based inferences
Predicting Election Outcomes from Positive and Negative Trait Assessments of Candidate Images
Conventional wisdom, and a growing body of behavioral research, suggests that the nonverbal image of a candidate influences voter decision making. We presented subjects with images of political candidates and asked them to make four trait judgments based solely on viewing the photographs. Subjects were asked which of the two faces exhibited more competence, attractiveness, deceitfulness, and threat, which are arguably four of the most salient att…
The efficiency of binding spontaneous trait inferences to actors’ faces
Probability as a psychological distance
Spontaneous trait inferences are bound to actors' faces
A false recognition paradigm showed that spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) are bound to the person performing a trait-implying behavior. In 6 experiments, participants memorized faces and behavioral sentences. When faces were paired with implied traits in a recognition test, participants falsely recognized these traits more often than unrelated traits paired with the same faces or the same traits paired with familiar faces. The effect was obtai…
Public Opinion on Foreign Policy
Americans have a strong preference for multilateral foreign policies over unilateral foreign policies. But do Americans know their own preferences? Data from a national survey show wide misperceptions of public opinion on foreign policy. While Americans strongly prefer multilateral policies, they overestimate public support for unilateral policies. For example, while only 23 percent of respondents agreed that the more important lesson of Septembe…
The Person Reference Process in Spontaneous Trait Inferences
Five studies examined whether spontaneous trait inferences uniquely reference the person who performed a trait-implying behavior. On each study trial in 5 studies, participants saw 2 faces and a behavioral sentence referring to one of them. Later, participants saw face-trait pairs and indicated whether they had seen the trait word in the sentence presented with the face. Participants falsely recognized implied traits more when these traits were p…
Republican Voters Prefer Candidates Who Have Conservative‐Looking Faces
Research shows people share common political facial stereotypes: They associate faces with political ideologies. Moreover, given that many voters rely on party affiliation, political ideology, and appearances to select political candidates, we might expect that political facial stereotypes would sway voting preferences and, by extension, the share of votes going to each candidate in an election. And yet few studies have examined whether having a …
Competence ratings in US predict presidential election outcomes in Bulgaria
Can we reduce facial biases? Persistent effects of facial trustworthiness on sentencing decisions
Trait impressions from faces influence many consequential decisions even in situations in which decisions should not be based on a person's appearance. Here, we test (a) whether people rely on trait impressions when making legal sentencing decisions and (b) whether two types of interventions—educating decision-makers and changing the accessibility of facial information—reduce the influence of facial stereotypes. We first introduced a novel legal …
When physical similarity matters
Communication effects on memory and judgment
The present research explored the mechanisms of judgmental and memory correction for communication influence. Participants described a target person to an addressee who either liked or disliked the target. Participants' descriptions were more positive when the addressee liked the target than when the addressee disliked the target. Mediation analyses showed that the effect of the addressee's attitude on judgment and memory was mediated by its effe…
Statistical learning shapes face evaluation
Context Effects in National Health Surveys
Journal Article Context Effects in National Health Surveys: Effects of Preceding Questions on Reporting Serious Difficulty Seeing and Legal Blindness Get access ALEXANDER TODOROV ALEXANDER TODOROV Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 64, Issue 1, March 2000, Pages 65–76, https://doi.org/10.1086/316760 Published: 01 March 2000
The Accessibility and Applicability of Knowledge
Using data from the National Health Interview Survey on Disability from 1994 and 1995, this research demonstrates that the size of accessibility effects (increased likelihood of using information activated by initial questions in responding to subsequent questions) can be modeled as a function of the applicability of the initial to the subsequent questions. When respondents reported a disability and were asked about the main condition causing the…
The determinants of consciousness of human faces
Criminal stereotypes in the courtroom
Three studies using between-subjects designs examined the effect of facial tattoos on two stages of a courtroom trial. The presence of a facial tattoo affected judgments of guilt, but it did not lead to higher punishment ratings. This was the case for different types of crime varying in offense seriousness and for faces varying in perceived trustworthiness. The effect on guilt was fully mediated by the perceived criminal appearance of the tattooe…
Holistic person processing
Faces and bodies are typically encountered simultaneously, yet little research has explored the visual processing of the full person. Specifically, it is unknown whether the face and body are perceived as distinct components or as an integrated, gestalt-like unit. To examine this question, we investigated whether emotional face-body composites are processed in a holistic-like manner by using a variant of the composite face task, a measure of holi…
Inferring the preferences of others from spontaneous, low-emotional facial expressions
Generative models for visualizing idiosyncratic impressions
In their comprehensive review of research on impressions from faces, Sutherland and Young (this issue) highlight both the remarkable progress and the many challenges facing the field. We focus on two of the challenges: the need for generative, powerful models of impressions and the idiosyncratic nature of complex impressions
Economic status cues from clothes affect perceived competence from faces
I care, even after the first impression
From Post-Communism to Post-Democracy
The analysis starts from a key question: how many transformations did post-communism, which came as a promise and project for one transformation, actually carry out? This article is a conceptual, not an event narrative about the transformations of democratization. Its theoretical ambition is threefold. The first aim is to develop a new analytical model for the study of transformations based on the concept of ‘symbolic-ideological hegemony’ and a …
Robust effects of affective person learning on evaluation of faces
People form impressions of others from multiple sources of information. Facial appearance is one such source and judgments based on facial appearance are made after minimal exposure to faces. A more reliable source of information is affective person learning based on others' past actions. Here we investigated whether the effects of such appearance-independent learning on face evaluation emerge after rapid face exposure, a response deadline proced…
Ethnic minorities and political representation
The political representation of minority groups in Bulgaria is analyzed from three perspectives. The first relates to political socialization: the mechanisms of minority political preference, and their materialization into political behavior, mostly during elections or through party membership. The second relates to political actors' conduct towards minorities: their attitudes toward minority identities and the significance of minority representa…
Another Look at Reasoning Experiments
In many studies, human reasoning has been depicted as “biased” or deviating from normative models in both areas of deductive and inductive reasoning. Two criteria for evaluation of reasoning studies are proposed in this paper. The first criterion concerns the selection and application of normative models against which human performance is assessed. The second criterion concerns the role of conversational factors in the differential selection of i…
Communication context, explanation, and social judgment
The effects of the communication context on explanations and judgments were investigated in two experiments where participants explained a boy's violent behavior either to a disciplinarian or to a permissive addressee. The results of Study 1 showed that the participants' explanations varied as a function of communication context, but their judgments of responsibility were not influenced. In Study 2, the communication demand was either subtle or b…
Context Effects in National Health Surveys
Journal Article Context Effects in National Health Surveys: Effects of Preceding Questions on Reporting Serious Difficulty Seeing and Legal Blindness Get access ALEXANDER TODOROV ALEXANDER TODOROV Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 64, Issue 1, March 2000, Pages 65–76, https://doi.org/10.1086/316760 Published: 01 March 2000
The Accessibility and Applicability of Knowledge
Using data from the National Health Interview Survey on Disability from 1994 and 1995, this research demonstrates that the size of accessibility effects (increased likelihood of using information activated by initial questions in responding to subsequent questions) can be modeled as a function of the applicability of the initial to the subsequent questions. When respondents reported a disability and were asked about the main condition causing the…
The Heuristic-Systematic Model of Social Information Processing
Communication effects on memory and judgment
The present research explored the mechanisms of judgmental and memory correction for communication influence. Participants described a target person to an addressee who either liked or disliked the target. Participants' descriptions were more positive when the addressee liked the target than when the addressee disliked the target. Mediation analyses showed that the effect of the addressee's attitude on judgment and memory was mediated by its effe…
Spontaneous trait inferences are bound to actors' faces
A false recognition paradigm showed that spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) are bound to the person performing a trait-implying behavior. In 6 experiments, participants memorized faces and behavioral sentences. When faces were paired with implied traits in a recognition test, participants falsely recognized these traits more often than unrelated traits paired with the same faces or the same traits paired with familiar faces. The effect was obtai…
The efficiency of binding spontaneous trait inferences to actors’ faces
The Person Reference Process in Spontaneous Trait Inferences
Five studies examined whether spontaneous trait inferences uniquely reference the person who performed a trait-implying behavior. On each study trial in 5 studies, participants saw 2 faces and a behavioral sentence referring to one of them. Later, participants saw face-trait pairs and indicated whether they had seen the trait word in the sentence presented with the face. Participants falsely recognized implied traits more when these traits were p…
Public Opinion on Foreign Policy
Americans have a strong preference for multilateral foreign policies over unilateral foreign policies. But do Americans know their own preferences? Data from a national survey show wide misperceptions of public opinion on foreign policy. While Americans strongly prefer multilateral policies, they overestimate public support for unilateral policies. For example, while only 23 percent of respondents agreed that the more important lesson of Septembe…
Inferences of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes
We show that inferences of competence based solely on facial appearance predicted the outcomes of U.S. congressional elections better than chance (e.g., 68.8% of the Senate races in 2004) and also were linearly related to the margin of victory. These inferences were specific to competence and occurred within a 1-second exposure to the faces of the candidates. The findings suggest that rapid, unreflective trait inferences can contribute to voting …
First Impressions
People often draw trait inferences from the facial appearance of other people. We investigated the minimal conditions under which people make such inferences. In five experiments, each focusing on a specific trait judgment, we manipulated the exposure time of unfamiliar faces. Judgments made after a 100-ms exposure correlated highly with judgments made in the absence of time constraints, suggesting that this exposure time was sufficient for parti…
Probability as a psychological distance
Predicting political elections from rapid and unreflective face judgments
Here we show that rapid judgments of competence based solely on the facial appearance of candidates predicted the outcomes of gubernatorial elections, the most important elections in the United States next to the presidential elections. In all experiments, participants were presented with the faces of the winner and the runner-up and asked to decide who is more competent. To ensure that competence judgments were based solely on facial appearance …
Evaluating Faces on Trustworthiness
People routinely make various trait judgments from facial appearance, and such judgments affect important social outcomes. These judgments are highly correlated with each other, reflecting the fact that valence evaluation permeates trait judgments from faces. Trustworthiness judgments best approximate this evaluation, consistent with evidence about the involvement of the amygdala in the implicit evaluation of face trustworthiness. Based on comput…
Understanding evaluation of faces on social dimensions
The functional basis of face evaluation
People automatically evaluate faces on multiple trait dimensions, and these evaluations predict important social outcomes, ranging from electoral success to sentencing decisions. Based on behavioral studies and computer modeling, we develop a 2D model of face evaluation. First, using a principal components analysis of trait judgments of emotionally neutral faces, we identify two orthogonal dimensions, valence and dominance, that are sufficient to…
Evaluating Faces on Trustworthiness After Minimal Time Exposure
Previous studies have shown that trustworthiness judgments from facial appearance approximate general valence evaluation of faces (Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008) and are made after as little as 100 ms exposure to novel faces (Willis & Todorov, 2006). In Experiment 1, using better masking procedures and shorter exposures, we replicate the latter findings. In Experiment 2, we systematically manipulate the exposure to faces and show that a sigmoid funct…
L’engagement citoyen en Europe de l’Est
Le rapport du citoyen aux affaires de la cité ne cesse d’intéresser les sciences sociales et nous sommes loin d'avoir les éléments essentiels pour en comprendre les mécanismes. La philosophie politique moderne, en se référant au modèle de la démocratie athénienne de l’époque classique, prescrit au citoyen le devoir de s’intéresser aux affaires publiques, d’y participer, d’être actif. Mais depuis plusieurs décennies, la sociologie politique décrit…
Y a-t-il démocratie sans participation
Dans tous les pays d’Europe on observe une tendance nette à la baisse de la participation électorale, mais avec une différence très visible entre l’Ouest et l’Est. Dans les nouvelles démocraties, qui découvrent les élections pluralistes après presque cinquante ans de régime communiste à parti unique, on observe un niveau de participation électoral plus bas que dans les démocraties établies de l’Ouest, et la baisse est bien plus prononcée pendant …
Structural resemblance to emotional expressions predicts evaluation of emotionally neutral faces
People make trait inferences based on facial appearance despite little evidence that these inferences accurately reflect personality. The authors tested the hypothesis that these inferences are driven in part by structural resemblance to emotional expressions. The authors first had participants judge emotionally neutral faces on a set of trait dimensions. The authors then submitted the face images to a Bayesian network classifier trained to detec…
Shared perceptual basis of emotional expressions and trustworthiness impressions from faces
Using a dynamic stimuli paradigm, in which faces expressed either happiness or anger, the authors tested the hypothesis that perceptions of trustworthiness are related to these expressions. Although the same emotional intensity was added to both trustworthy and untrustworthy faces, trustworthy faces who expressed happiness were perceived as happier than untrustworthy faces, and untrustworthy faces who expressed anger were perceived as angrier tha…
Fooled by first impressions? Reexamining the diagnostic value of appearance-based inferences
Elected in 100 milliseconds
Les élections européennes de juin 2009 dans les pays de l'Europe centrale et orientale
Cette étude compare les grandes tendances des élections européennes dans les pays de l’Europe centrale et orientale depuis leur adhésion à l’Union européenne. Au delà des différentes nationales, il est montré comment la thèse de la spécificité des comportements électoraux dans la région doit être nuancée à la suite du dernier scrutin européen dont le déroulement et les résultats portent, comme à l’ouest mais sans doute encore plus vigoureusement,…
Psychology (54 works) · Social Psychology (45 works) · Cognitive psychology (39 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (35 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (30 works) · Face Recognition and Perception (27 works) · Perception (23 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Political science (20 works) · Social Psychology (19 works)