Nalini Ambady
Biographic Data
| ID | 101386 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nalini Ambady |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nalini |
| FAMILY NAME | Ambady |
| SIGNATURE | AMBADY N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tufts University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 75 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1046 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 19 |
Meta-lay theories of scientific potential drive underrepresented students’ sense of belonging to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)
The current research investigates people's perceptions of others' lay theories (or mindsets), an understudied construct that we call meta-lay theories. Six studies examine whether underrepresented students' meta-lay theories influence their sense of belonging to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The studies tested whether underrepresented students who perceive their faculty as believing most students have high scientific aptitude…
Identical applicant but different outcomes: The impact of gender versus race salience in hiring
People belong to multiple social groups, which may have conflicting stereotypic associations. A manager evaluating an Asian woman for a computer programming job could be influenced by negative gender stereotypes or by positive racial stereotypes. We hypothesized that evaluations of job candidates can depend upon what social group is more salient, even when both are apparent. In three studies, using student (Study 1) and nonstudent (Studies 2 and …
Perceptions of variability in facial emotion influence beliefs about the stability of psychological characteristics
Beliefs about the malleability versus stability of traits (incremental vs. entity lay theories) have a profound impact on social cognition and self-regulation, shaping phenomena that range from the fundamental attribution error and group-based stereotyping to academic motivation and achievement. Less is known about the causes than the effects of these lay theories, and in the current work the authors examine the perception of facial emotion as a …
Cognition from on high and down low: Verticality and construal level
Across 7 studies, the authors examined the relationship between experiences of verticality and abstract versus concrete processing. Experiencing high, relative to low, verticality led to higher level identifications for actions (Study 1), greater willingness to delay short-term monetary gains for larger long-term monetary gains (Studies 2 and 5), and more frequent perceptions of meaningful relationships between objects and categories (Studies 3, …
Relieving the Burdens of Secrecy: Revealing Secrets Influences Judgments of Hill Slant and Distance
Recent work demonstrates that harboring secrets influences perceptual judgments and actions. Individuals carrying secrets make judgments consistent with the experience of being weighed down, such as judging a hill as steeper and judging distances to be farther. In the present article, two studies examined whether revealing a secret would relieve the burden of secrecy. Relative to a control condition, thinking about a secret led to the judgments o…
Aggressive Acts Increase Commitment to New Groups: Zombie Attacks and Blocked Shots
How do individuals who switch between opposing sides develop a sense of commitment to their new groups? Study 1 examined these dynamics in a live-action tag game known as Humans versus Zombies, in which players transitioned from being Human to being Zombie, thus turning against their former fellow Humans. Study 2 examined data from professional basketball players in the National Basketball Association who moved to a new team and had to play again…
On the interactive influence of facial appearance and explicit knowledge in social categorization
Although people form impressions of others with ease, sometimes one's initial perceptions of individuals conflict with what one knows about them. Here, we aimed to investigate the process by which explicit knowledge about people interacts with initial perceptions on the basis of cues from facial appearance. Participants memorized the sexual orientations of men's faces wherein half of the targets were encoded with a sexual orientation opposite to …
Essentialist thinking predicts decrements in children’s memory for racially ambiguous faces
Past research shows that adults often display poor memory for racially ambiguous and racial outgroup faces, with both face types remembered worse than own-race faces. In the present study, the authors examined whether children also show this pattern of results. They also examined whether emerging essentialist thinking about race predicts children's memory for faces. Seventy-four White children (ages 4-9 years) completed a face-memory task compris…
Monoracial and Biracial Children: Effects of Racial Identity Saliency on Social Learning and Social Preferences
Children prefer learning from, and affiliating with, their racial in-group but those preferences may vary for biracial children. Monoracial (White, Black, Asian) and biracial (Black/White, Asian/White) children (N = 246, 3-8 years) had their racial identity primed. In a learning preferences task, participants determined the function of a novel object after watching adults (White, Black, and Asian) demonstrate its uses. In the social preferences t…
Face to (Face)Book: The Two Faces of Social Behavior
UNLABELLED: Social networking sites such as Facebook represent a unique and dynamic social environment. OBJECTIVE: This study addresses three theoretical issues in personality psychology in the context of online social networking sites: (a) the temporal consistency of Facebook activity, (b) people's awareness of their online behavior, and (c) comparison of social behavior on Facebook with self- and informant-reported behavior in real life. METHOD…
Red enhances the processing of facial expressions of anger
Emotional expressions convey important social information. Given the social importance of decoding emotions, expressive faces wield great influence on cognition and perception. However, contextual factors also exert a top-down influence on emotion detection, privileging particular expressions over others. The current research investigates how the psychological meaning implied by the color red biases the processing of anger expressions. Red has be…
Diversity ideologies and intergroup relations: An examination of colorblindness and multiculturalism
In this review, we highlight the importance of understanding diversity ideologies, or people's beliefs and practices regarding diversity, for social psychological research on intergroup relations. This review focuses on two diversity ideologies, colorblindness and multiculturalism, and their impact on core issues related to intergroup conflict, such as stereotypes, prejudice, attitudes toward inequality, interracial interactions, and disparate ou…
When the half affects the whole: Priming identity for biracial individuals in social interactions
The role of non‐verbal behaviour in racial disparities in health care: Implications and Solutions
As doctors' disengaged non-verbal behaviour towards minority group patients and lower ability to read minority group patients' non-verbal behaviours may contribute to racial disparities in patients' satisfaction and health outcomes, solutions that target non-verbal behaviour may be effective. A number of strategies for such targeting are discussed
Accuracy and consensus in judgments of trustworthiness from faces: Behavioral and neural correlates
Perceivers' inferences about individuals based on their faces often show high interrater consensus and can even accurately predict behavior in some domains. Here we investigated the consensus and accuracy of judgments of trustworthiness. In Study 1, we showed that the type of photo judged makes a significant difference for whether an individual is judged as trustworthy. In Study 2, we found that inferences of trustworthiness made from the faces o…
Personality impressions from identity claims on Facebook
Facebook profiles are routinely viewed and judged by others. We examined the categories of information that are utilized by observers and we tested the predictive validity of personality ratings based on Facebook Info pages. Raters made personality judgments of target individuals, either based on full Facebook Info pages or single categories of information (e.g., profile picture, interests, music preferences, etc.). Personality ratings for the In…
Getting a word in group-wise: Effects of racial diversity on gender dynamics
Influences of culture and visual context on real-time social categorization
Dyadic interracial interactions: A meta-analysis
This meta-analysis examined over 40 years of research on interracial interactions by exploring 4 types of outcomes: explicit attitudes toward interaction partners, participants' self-reports of their own emotional state, nonverbal or observed behavior, and objective measures of performance. Data were collected from 108 samples (N = 12,463) comparing dyadic interracial and same-race interactions, predominantly featuring Black and White Americans. …
A dynamic interactive theory of person construal.
A dynamic interactive theory of person construal is proposed. It assumes that the perception of other people is accomplished by a dynamical system involving continuous interaction between social categories, stereotypes, high-level cognitive states, and the low-level processing of facial, vocal, and bodily cues. This system permits lower-level sensory perception and higher-order social cognition to dynamically coordinate across multiple interactiv…
Looking the Part: Social Status Cues Shape Race Perception
It is commonly believed that race is perceived through another's facial features, such as skin color. In the present research, we demonstrate that cues to social status that often surround a face systematically change the perception of its race. Participants categorized the race of faces that varied along White-Black morph continua and that were presented with high-status or low-status attire. Low-status attire increased the likelihood of categor…
Judgments of Power From College Yearbook Photos and Later Career Success
Inferences from faces can predict important real-world outcomes. But little is known about the stability of these effects. Here the authors find that inferences of power from photos of the faces of the managing partners of America’s top 100 law firms significantly corresponded to their success as leaders, as measured by the amounts of profits that their firms earned. More interesting, this relationship was also observed when judgments were made b…
Gender moderates the relationship between emotion and perceived gaze
Recent evidence shows that gender modulates the morphology of facial expressions and might thus alter the meaning of those expressions. Consequently, we hypothesized that gender would moderate the relationship between facial expressions and the perception of direct gaze. In Study 1, participants viewed male and female faces exhibiting joy, anger, fear, and neutral expressions displayed with direct and averted gazes. Perceptions of direct gaze wer…
Ratings of Essentialism for Eight Religious Identities
As a social identity, religion is unique because it contains a spectrum of choice. In some religious communities, individuals are considered members by virtue of having parents of that background, and religion, culture, and ethnicity are closely intertwined. Other faith communities actively invite people of other backgrounds to join, expecting individuals to choose the religion that best fits their personal beliefs. These various methods of ident…
Cross-cultural impressions of leaders’ faces: Consensus and predictive validity
Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences: A meta-analysis
A meta-analysis was conducted on the accuracy of predictions of various objective outcomes in the areas of social and clinical psychology from short observations of expressive behavior (under 5 min). The overall effect size (/) for the accuracy of predictions for 38 different results was.39. Studies using longer periods of behavioral observation did not yield greater predictive accuracy; predictions based on observations under Vi min in length di…
On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis
Half a minute: Predicting teacher evaluations from thin slices of nonverbal behavior and physical attractiveness
The accuracy of strangers ' consensual judgments of personality based on "thin slices " of targets' nonverbal behavior were examined in relation to an ecologically valid criterion variable. In the 1st study, consensual judgments of college teachers ' molar nonverbal behavior based on very brief (under 30 s) silent video clips significantly predicted global end-of-semester student evaluations of teachers. In the 2nd study, similar judgments predic…
Brief exposures: Male sexual orientation is accurately perceived at 50ms
People have proved adept at categorizing others into social categories, at least when the categorical distinction is perceptually obvious (e.g., age, race, or gender). There remain many social groups whose boundaries are less clear, however. The current work therefore tested judgments of an ambiguous social category (male sexual orientation) from faces shown for durations between 33 ms and 10,000 ms. The sexual orientation of faces presented for …
Accuracy of judgments of sexual orientation from thin slices of behavior
Female sexual orientation is perceived accurately, rapidly, and automatically from the face and its features
Learning (not) to talk about race: When older children underperform in social categorization
Though older children exhibit superior performance on a race-neutral version of the task, their tendency to avoid acknowledging race hinders objective success when race is a relevant category. That these findings emerge in late childhood, in a pattern counter to the normal developmental trajectory of increased cognitive expertise in categorization, suggests that this anomaly indicates the onset of a critical transition in human social development
Diversity ideologies and intergroup relations: An examination of colorblindness and multiculturalism
In this review, we highlight the importance of understanding diversity ideologies, or people's beliefs and practices regarding diversity, for social psychological research on intergroup relations. This review focuses on two diversity ideologies, colorblindness and multiculturalism, and their impact on core issues related to intergroup conflict, such as stereotypes, prejudice, attitudes toward inequality, interracial interactions, and disparate ou…
On judging and being judged accurately in zero-acquaintance situations
This research examined the role of personality, nonverbal skills, and gender as moderators ofjudging and being judged accurately in zero-acquaintance situations. Unacquainted participants, assembled in groups, completed a battery of personality tests, took 2 audiovisual tests (the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity [PONS] and the Interpersonal Perception Task [IPT]) intended to assess decoding skills and then rated themselves and every other person…
Polling the face: Prediction and consensus across cultures
Previous work has shown that individuals agree across cultures on the traits that they infer from faces. Previous work has also shown that inferences from faces can be predictive of important outcomes within cultures. The current research merges these two lines of work. In a series of cross-cultural studies, the authors asked American and Japanese participants to provide naïve inferences of traits from the faces of U.S. political candidates (Stud…
Accuracy and awareness in the perception and categorization of male sexual orientation
For clear and unambiguous social categories, person perception occurs quite accurately from minimal cues. This article addresses the perception of an ambiguous social category (male sexual orientation) from minimal cues. Across 5 studies, the authors examined individuals' actual and self-assessed accuracy when judging male sexual orientation from faces and facial features. Although participants were able to make accurate judgments from multiple f…
Deflecting negative self-relevant stereotype activation: The effects of individuation
Effects of situational power on automatic racial prejudice
Not so black and white: Memory for ambiguous group members
Exponential increases in multiracial identities, expected over the next century, create a conundrum for perceivers accustomed to classifying people as their own- or other-race. The current research examines how perceivers resolve this dilemma with regard to the own-race bias. The authors hypothesized that perceivers are not motivated to include ambiguous-race individuals in the in-group and therefore have some difficulty remembering these individ…
Math is Hard!” The effect of gender priming on women’s attitudes
When familiarity breeds accuracy: Cultural exposure and facial emotion recognition
Two studies provide evidence for the role of cultural familiarity in recognizing facial expressions of emotion. For Chinese located in China and the United States, Chinese Americans, and non-Asian Americans, accuracy and speed in judging Chinese and American emotions was greater with greater participant exposure to the group posing the expressions. Likewise, Tibetans residing in China and Africans residing in the United States were faster and mor…
Stereotype performance boosts: The impact of self-relevance and the manner of stereotype activation
The activation of positive stereotypes has been shown to produce academic performance boosts. Evidence regarding the role of self-relevance in producing such effects has been mixed. The authors propose that the subtlety of stereotype activation plays a key role in creating performance boosts among targets and nontargets of stereotypes. Study 1 found that subtle stereotype activation boosted performance in targets, but blatant activation did not. …
Accuracy and consensus in judgments of trustworthiness from faces: Behavioral and neural correlates
Perceivers' inferences about individuals based on their faces often show high interrater consensus and can even accurately predict behavior in some domains. Here we investigated the consensus and accuracy of judgments of trustworthiness. In Study 1, we showed that the type of photo judged makes a significant difference for whether an individual is judged as trustworthy. In Study 2, we found that inferences of trustworthiness made from the faces o…
Dyadic interracial interactions: A meta-analysis
This meta-analysis examined over 40 years of research on interracial interactions by exploring 4 types of outcomes: explicit attitudes toward interaction partners, participants' self-reports of their own emotional state, nonverbal or observed behavior, and objective measures of performance. Data were collected from 108 samples (N = 12,463) comparing dyadic interracial and same-race interactions, predominantly featuring Black and White Americans. …
Continuous dynamics in the real-time perception of race
On being sad and mistaken: Mood effects on the accuracy of thin-slice judgments
A series of studies explored how sadness impacts the accuracy of social judgments. In Study 1, induced sadness led to reduced accuracy in judgments of teacher effectiveness from brief samples of nonverbal behavior (thin slices). In Study 2, sad participants showed reduced accuracy in judging relationship type from thin slices as well as diminished judgmental efficiency. Study 3 revealed that higher Beck Depression Inventory scores were associated…
She’s Got the Look: Inferences from Female Chief Executive Officers’ Faces Predict their Success
Affective divergence: Automatic responses to others' emotions depend on group membership
Extant research suggests that targets' emotion expressions automatically evoke similar affect in perceivers. The authors hypothesized that the automatic impact of emotion expressions depends on group membership. In Experiments 1 and 2, an affective priming paradigm was used to measure immediate and preconscious affective responses to same-race or other-race emotion expressions. In Experiment 3, spontaneous vocal affect was measured as participant…
When the half affects the whole: Priming identity for biracial individuals in social interactions
Is there an in-group advantage in emotion recognition
H. A. Elfenbein and N. Ambady (2002) examined the evidence for an in-group advantage in emotion recognition, whereby recognition is generally more accurate for perceivers from the same cultural group as emotional expressors. D. Matsumoto's (2002) comment centered on 3 asserted methodological requirements. This response addresses the lack of consensus conceming these "requirements" and demonstrates that none alter the presence of the in-group adva…
Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences: A meta-analysis
A meta-analysis was conducted on the accuracy of predictions of various objective outcomes in the areas of social and clinical psychology from short observations of expressive behavior (under 5 min). The overall effect size (/) for the accuracy of predictions for 38 different results was.39. Studies using longer periods of behavioral observation did not yield greater predictive accuracy; predictions based on observations under Vi min in length di…
Half a minute: Predicting teacher evaluations from thin slices of nonverbal behavior and physical attractiveness
The accuracy of strangers ' consensual judgments of personality based on "thin slices " of targets' nonverbal behavior were examined in relation to an ecologically valid criterion variable. In the 1st study, consensual judgments of college teachers ' molar nonverbal behavior based on very brief (under 30 s) silent video clips significantly predicted global end-of-semester student evaluations of teachers. In the 2nd study, similar judgments predic…
On judging and being judged accurately in zero-acquaintance situations
This research examined the role of personality, nonverbal skills, and gender as moderators ofjudging and being judged accurately in zero-acquaintance situations. Unacquainted participants, assembled in groups, completed a battery of personality tests, took 2 audiovisual tests (the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity [PONS] and the Interpersonal Perception Task [IPT]) intended to assess decoding skills and then rated themselves and every other person…
More than words: Linguistic and nonlinguistic politeness in two cultures
This article extends the validity of politeness theory ( P. Brown & S. Levinson, 1987) by investigating the nonlinguistic aspects of politeness in 2 cultures. Politeness strategies expressed through different channels of communication (silent video, speech, full-channel video and audio, and transcripts of speech) were examined, and it was found that politeness strategies were communicated nonlinguistically as well as linguistically and that nonli…
Stereotype Susceptibility: Identity Salience and Shifts in Quantitative Performance
Recent studies have documented that performance in a domain is hindered when individuals feel that a sociocultural group to which they belong is negatively stereotyped in that domain. We report that implicit activation of a social identity can facilitate as well as impede performance on a quantitative task. When a particular social identity was made salient at an implicit level, performance was altered in the direction predicted by the stereotype…
Identity Adaptiveness: Affect Across Multiple Identities
Most empirical work that examines the effects of stereotypes on targets considers only one of a target's many social identities. This study examined how individuals implicitly affectively orient themselves toward their social identities in situations in which one or another of these identities is relatively adaptive. An adaptive identity is one associated with stereotypes that predict desirable performance in a given context. One hundred and twen…
Accuracy of judgments of sexual orientation from thin slices of behavior
Toward a histology of social behavior: Judgmental accuracy from thin slices of the behavioral stream
Will a Category Cue Affect You? Category Cues, Positive Stereotypes and Reviewer Recall for Applicants
Stereotype Susceptibility in Children: Effects of Identity Activation on Quantitative Performance
A growing body of research indicates that the activation of negative stereotypes can impede cognitive performance in adults, whereas positive stereotypes can facilitate cognitive performance. In two studies, we examined the effects of positive and negative stereotypes on the cognitive performance of children in three age groups: lower elementary school, upper elementary school, and middle school. Very young children in the lower elementary grades…
Who's in Charge? Effects of Situational Roles on Automatic Gender Bias
The Languages of the Brain
Cross-cultural patterns in emotion recognition: Highlighting design and analytical techniques
This article highlights a range of design and analytical tools for studying the cross-cultural communication of emotion using forced-choice experimental designs. American, Indian, and Japanese participants judged facial expressions from all 3 cultures. A factorial experimental design is used, balanced n x n across cultures, to separate "absolute" cultural differences from "relational" effects characterizing the relationship between the emotion ex…
On being sad and mistaken: Mood effects on the accuracy of thin-slice judgments
A series of studies explored how sadness impacts the accuracy of social judgments. In Study 1, induced sadness led to reduced accuracy in judgments of teacher effectiveness from brief samples of nonverbal behavior (thin slices). In Study 2, sad participants showed reduced accuracy in judging relationship type from thin slices as well as diminished judgmental efficiency. Study 3 revealed that higher Beck Depression Inventory scores were associated…
Stereotype performance boosts: The impact of self-relevance and the manner of stereotype activation
The activation of positive stereotypes has been shown to produce academic performance boosts. Evidence regarding the role of self-relevance in producing such effects has been mixed. The authors propose that the subtlety of stereotype activation plays a key role in creating performance boosts among targets and nontargets of stereotypes. Study 1 found that subtle stereotype activation boosted performance in targets, but blatant activation did not. …
On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis
Is there an in-group advantage in emotion recognition
H. A. Elfenbein and N. Ambady (2002) examined the evidence for an in-group advantage in emotion recognition, whereby recognition is generally more accurate for perceivers from the same cultural group as emotional expressors. D. Matsumoto's (2002) comment centered on 3 asserted methodological requirements. This response addresses the lack of consensus conceming these "requirements" and demonstrates that none alter the presence of the in-group adva…
When familiarity breeds accuracy: Cultural exposure and facial emotion recognition
Two studies provide evidence for the role of cultural familiarity in recognizing facial expressions of emotion. For Chinese located in China and the United States, Chinese Americans, and non-Asian Americans, accuracy and speed in judging Chinese and American emotions was greater with greater participant exposure to the group posing the expressions. Likewise, Tibetans residing in China and Africans residing in the United States were faster and mor…
Deflecting negative self-relevant stereotype activation: The effects of individuation
P300 as an index of attention to self-relevant stimuli
Effects of situational power on automatic racial prejudice
On How Things Are Said: Voice Tone, Voice Intensity, Verbal Content, and Perceptions of Politeness
Individuals in two studies listened to statements or questions that were either consistent or inconsistent across verbal content and tone of voice. Results showed that tone of voice substantially affected judges' ratings of the politeness for positive content statements but did so only minimally for negative content statements. Tone of voice affected judges' politeness ratings of both positive and negative questions
Cultural Similarity's Consequences: A Distance Perspective on Cross-Cultural Differences in Emotion Recognition
Previous research found null results examining predicted relationships between emotion recognition accuracy and Hofstede's cultural dimensions. Prior theory was "static," linking cultural profiles with absolute levels of emotion recognition accuracy. By contrast, a "distance" theory links cultural differences with the discrepancy in recognition accuracy achieved by members of the group posing versus the group recognizing the expressions, known as…
The Effects of Fear and Anger Facial Expressions on Approach- and Avoidance-Related Behaviors
The facial expressions of fear and anger are universal social signals in humans. Both expressions have been frequently presumed to signify threat to perceivers and therefore are often used in studies investigating responses to threatening stimuli. Here the authors show that the anger expression facilitates avoidance-related behavior in participants, which supports the notion of this expression being a threatening stimulus. The fear expression, on…
Math is Hard!” The effect of gender priming on women’s attitudes
Psychology (74 works) · Social Psychology (66 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (46 works) · Social Psychology (39 works) · Cognitive psychology (37 works) · Developmental psychology (35 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (25 works) · Perception (24 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (23 works) · Communication (17 works)