Nicholas O Rule
Biographic Data
| ID | 109575 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicholas O Rule |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicholas |
| FAMILY NAME | O Rule |
| SIGNATURE | RULE N O |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2332-9058 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 75 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 417 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Short-Term and Long-Term Mating Strategies Show Distinct Patterns of Attraction to Dominance and Prestige
People generally covet high-rank romantic partners. Yet, the multidimensional strategies of attaining social rank (dominance and prestige) and sociosexuality (long-term and short-term mating orientations) leave open the question of which strategies for attaining social rank are coveted, and by whom. We provide greater resolution into understanding attraction to social rank strategies by demonstrating that people with higher long-term mating orien…
City Slicker or Country Bumpkin?—Distinguishing Urban and Rural Residents From Subtle Facial Cues
Stereotypes characterize urban and rural residents as differing in traits, values and social outcomes. Here, we examined how people's stereotypes about urban and rural residents differ, testing their validity using a lens model. Results showed that participants detected whether people resided in urban or rural areas from photos across three nations: the United States, Canada and Japan. North American and Japanese participants shared similar stere…
Accuracy, Bias, and Overgeneralization: Perceived Aggression Guides Threat Detection and Punishment of Female Criminal Offenders
From pandemic crisis to recovery and resilience: Lessons from Covid-19 at a large urban research university
The abrupt onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced a dramatic shift in higher education. Over time, the prolonged and cyclical nature of public-health restrictions conditioned students, faculty, and staff to adopt a crisis mindset as their baseline. Moving from crisis to recovery therefore posed unique obstacles at both individual (e.g. anxiety, exhaustion, and post-traumatic stress) and organizational levels (e.g. transition logistics, labor marke…
Stereotypes and social decisions: The interpersonal consequences of socioeconomic status
Perceptions of socioeconomic status (SES) can perpetuate inequality by influencing interpersonal interactions in ways that disadvantage people with low SES. Indeed, lab studies have provided evidence that people can detect others' SES and that they may use this information to apply stereotypes that influence interpersonal decisions. Here, we examine how SES and SES-based stereotypes affect real-world social interactions between people from a soci…
Consistent Facial Cues to Social Class Across Two Different Western Contexts
Individuals form impressions of others’ social‐class standing from nonverbal information, including facial appearance. Whether the facial cues relating to (perceptions of) social class generalize across different contexts and class measures (e.g., income and subjective status) remains unknown. We tested which facial cues relate to actual and perceived social class using multiple social‐class measures in two contexts: Canada (using contemporary la…
Atheists and Christians can be Discerned from their Faces
Social judgments from faces and bodies
given that signal is a precondition to accuracy. Focusing on one kind of status/ability judgment-impressions of social class standing-we found that perceivers can discern individuals' social class standing from faces, bodies, and whole persons. Conditions that included bodies returned higher accuracy, indicating that bodies may contain more signal to individuals' social class than faces do. Within bodies, shape cued social class more than details…
Relating Facial Trustworthiness to Antisocial Behavior in Adolescent and Adult Men
Gender stereotypes explain different mental prototypes of male and female leaders
Appearance Reveals Music Preferences
Disclosing idiosyncratic preferences can help to broker new social interactions. For instance, strangers exchange music preferences to signal their identities, values, and preferences. Recognizing that people’s physical appearances guide their decisions about social engagement, we examined whether cues to people’s music preferences in their physical appearance and expressive poses help to guide social interaction. We found that perceivers could d…
Parsing the Mechanisms Underlying Ingroup Facial Resemblance
People prefer to form relationships with people like themselves—a tendency that extends even to facial appearance, resulting in groups whose members look alike. Here, we investigated the mechanisms underlying homophilic resemblance using facial photos of fraternity/sorority members from two time points: before joining the group and after belonging to the group for three years. Analyses of both subjective trait impressions and objective face-shape…
Narcissistic individuals exhibit poor recognition memory
Here, we examine face memory among individuals who are self‐focused and care little about others' needs: grandiose narcissists. Given narcissistic individuals' excessive self‐focus and tendency to disregard the needs of others, they may struggle to recognize faces and their surrounding environment. Indeed, narcissistic individuals demonstrated worse recognition memory than non‐narcissistic individuals in recognition memory tests for faces (Studie…
Individuals' favorite songs' lyrics reflect their attachment style
Recent studies suggest that one's personality relates to their music preferences. Separately, research from an attachment theory perspective has demonstrated that attachment security and insecurity are important relationship‐related individual differences. We combined these two lines of inquiry here by investigating whether the lyrics of individuals' favorite songs about relationships reflect their attachment styles and related Big Five personali…
Beyond categories: Perceiving sexual attraction from faces
Although people can categorize others’ sexual orientation (e.g., gay/lesbian vs. straight) from their facial appearance, not everyone defines their sexual orientation categorically. Indeed, many individuals within the same sexual orientation category experience different degrees of own‐ and other‐gender attraction. Moving beyond sexual orientation categories, we found that perceivers’ judgments of individuals’ sexual attraction correlated with th…
Fertility Status Does Not Facilitate Women’s Judgment of Male Sexual Orientation
Dictators Differ From Democratically Elected Leaders in Facial Warmth
Despite the many important considerations relevant to selecting a leader, facial appearance carries surprising sway. Following numerous studies documenting the role of facial appearance in government elections, we investigated differences in perceptions of dictators versus democratically elected leaders. Participants in Study 1 successfully classified pictures of 160 world leaders as democrats or dictators significantly better than chance. Probin…
People attribute humanness to men and women differently based on their facial appearance
Recognizing others' humanity is fundamental to how people think about and treat each other. People often ascribe greater humanness to groups that they socially value, but do they also systematically ascribe social value to different individuals? Here, we tested whether people (de)humanize individuals based on social traits inferred from their facial appearance, focusing on attractiveness and intelligence. Across five studies, less attractive and …
Endeavoring towards an experimental social psychology for all
To which world regions does the valence-dominance model of social perception apply
Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof an…
Common Academic Experiences No One Talks About: Repeated Rejection, Impostor Syndrome, and Burnout
Academic life is full of learning, excitement, and discovery. However, academics also experience professional challenges at various points in their career, including repeated rejection, impostor syndrome, and burnout. These negative experiences are rarely talked about publicly, creating a sense of loneliness and isolation for people who presume they are the only ones affected by such setbacks. However, nearly everyone has these experiences at one…
The Effect of Age-Stigma Concealment on Social Evaluations
Many older adults try to avoid age discrimination by hiding visible signs of aging. But using cosmetic procedures to conceal one’s age also incurs negative evaluations. This paradox prompted us to ask whether people can detect age concealment and, if so, whether they would either negatively evaluate concealers due to age-concealment stigmas or positively evaluate concealers because they look better. Across four studies with targets who underwent …
Accuracy and bias in first impressions of attachment style from faces
OBJECTIVE: People gather important social information from subtle nonverbal cues. Given that one's attachment style can meaningfully affect the quality of one's relationships, we investigated whether people could perceive men's and women's attachment styles from photos of their neutral faces. METHOD: In two studies, we measured targets' attachment styles then asked participants (total N = 893) to judge the male and female targets' attachment anxi…
Implicit Biculturalism Theories: How Bicultural Individuals Perceive Others and Organize Their Own Cultures
Bicultural individuals who blend their two cultures and identities (i.e., subscribe to a mixed culture) may assume that other bicultural individuals blend their cultures and identities too. Here, we introduce the concept and assessment of implicit biculturalism theories: beliefs about how two cultures reside within one individual. We hypothesized that bicultural individuals would perceive and think about others’ biculturalism based on how they or…
Perceptions and experiences of (people with) unconventional identities
Psychology has long focused on social identities and their critical role in defining the self. However, the majority of identity-related findings stems from research on traditional identities (monoracial, cisgender, heterosexual). Considering the relative dearth of research from the full range of identities encompassed in society (e.g., multiracial, transgender, bisexual), this special issue (a) highlights the experiences and perceptions of peopl…
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 …
Many Labs 3: Evaluating participant pool quality across the academic semester via replication
Female sexual orientation is perceived accurately, rapidly, and automatically from the face and its features
Racial bias in judgments of physical size and formidability: From size to threat
Black men tend to be stereotyped as threatening and, as a result, may be disproportionately targeted by police even when unarmed. Here, we found evidence that biased perceptions of young Black men's physical size may play a role in this process. The results of 7 studies showed that people have a bias to perceive young Black men as bigger (taller, heavier, more muscular) and more physically threatening (stronger, more capable of harm) than young W…
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…
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…
The visibility of social class from facial cues
Social class meaningfully impacts individuals' life outcomes and daily interactions, and the mere perception of one's socioeconomic standing can have significant ramifications. To better understand how people infer others' social class, we therefore tested the legibility of class (operationalized as monetary income) from facial images, finding across 4 participant samples and 2 stimulus sets that perceivers categorized the faces of rich and poor …
Impressions at the intersection of ambiguous and obvious social categories: Does gay + Black = likable
Perceptions of Sexual Orientation From Minimal Cues
She’s Got the Look: Inferences from Female Chief Executive Officers’ Faces Predict their Success
The politics of gaydar: Ideological differences in the use of gendered cues in categorizing sexual orientation
In the present research, we investigated whether, because of differences in cognitive style, liberals and conservatives would differ in the process of categorizing individuals into a perceptually ambiguous group. In 3 studies, we examined whether conservatives were more likely than liberals to rely on gender inversion cues (e.g., feminine = gay) when categorizing male faces as gay vs. straight, and the accuracy implications of differential cue us…
Charisma in everyday life: Conceptualization and validation of the General Charisma Inventory
Although both scholars and lay people are fascinated with charismatic individuals, relatively few theorists have attempted to define charisma. Much of the empirical research examining charisma has focused on leadership. Even within that literature, however, theorists have focused on charisma's outcomes, leaving unarticulated what charisma actually is. Here, we tested an operational conceptualization of charisma in the context of everyday life. Sp…
Perceptions of personality in text-based media and OSN: A meta-analysis
Accurate Identification of a Preference for Insertive Versus Receptive Intercourse from Static Facial Cues of Gay Men
Configural processing and social judgments: Face inversion particularly disrupts inferences of human-relevant traits
Thin slices of child personality: Perceptual, situational, and behavioral contributions
The present study examined whether thin-slice ratings of child personality serve as a resource-efficient and theoretically valid measurement of child personality traits. We extended theoretical work on the observability, perceptual accuracy, and situational consistency of childhood personality traits by examining intersource and interjudge agreement, cross-situational consistency, and convergent, divergent, and predictive validity of thin-slice r…
The big man has a big mouth: Mouth width correlates with perceived leadership ability and actual leadership performance
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 …
To which world regions does the valence-dominance model of social perception apply
Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof an…
Internalized Homophobia Influences Perceptions of Men’s Sexual Orientation from Photos of Their Faces
Individual Differences in Perceptions of Gay Men’s Sexual Role Preferences from Facial Cues
Places and faces: Geographic environment influences the ingroup memory advantage
The preferential allocation of attention and memory to the ingroup (the ingroup memory advantage) is one of the most replicated effects in the psychological literature. But little is known about what factors may influence such effects. Here the authors investigated a potential influence: category salience as determined by the perceiver's geographic environment. They did so by studying the ingroup memory advantage in perceptually ambiguous groups …
On the relationship between acculturation and intercultural understanding: Insight from the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test
Cross-cultural impressions of leaders’ faces: Consensus and predictive validity
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 …
The Face of Success: Inferences From Chief Executive Officers' Appearance Predict Company Profits
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…
She’s Got the Look: Inferences from Female Chief Executive Officers’ Faces Predict their Success
Female sexual orientation is perceived accurately, rapidly, and automatically from the face and its features
Sexual Orientation Perception Involves Gendered Facial Cues
Perceivers can accurately judge a face’s sexual orientation, but the perceptual mechanisms mediating this remain obscure. The authors hypothesized that stereotypes casting gays and lesbians as gender “inverts,” in cultural circulation for a century and a half, lead perceivers to use gendered facial cues to infer sexual orientation. Using computer-generated faces, Study 1 showed that as two facial dimensions (shape and texture) became more gender …
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…
Places and faces: Geographic environment influences the ingroup memory advantage
The preferential allocation of attention and memory to the ingroup (the ingroup memory advantage) is one of the most replicated effects in the psychological literature. But little is known about what factors may influence such effects. Here the authors investigated a potential influence: category salience as determined by the perceiver's geographic environment. They did so by studying the ingroup memory advantage in perceptually ambiguous groups …
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…
Cross-cultural impressions of leaders’ faces: Consensus and predictive validity
Impressions at the intersection of ambiguous and obvious social categories: Does gay + Black = likable
Accuracy in Categorizing Perceptually Ambiguous Groups: A Review and Meta-Analysis
Since the 1940s, social psychologists have conducted research testing whether it is possible to accurately identify members of perceptually ambiguous groups. This study quantitatively reviews the research on the perception of ambiguous groups to better understand the human capacity to accurately identify others based on very subtle nonverbal cues. Standard random-effects meta-analytic techniques were used to examine the distinctions between diffe…
Detecting Suicidality From Facial Appearance
Suicide is a pervasive problem worldwide. In this investigation, we show that individuals can perceive suicidality from facial appearance with accuracy that is significantly greater than chance guessing. Inferences of expected or obvious cues, such as how depressed a person seems, did not lead to accurate judgments. Rather, perceptions of how impulsive an individual appears differentiated suicide victims from living controls. Teasing apart variou…
Accurate Identification of a Preference for Insertive Versus Receptive Intercourse from Static Facial Cues of Gay Men
The politics of gaydar: Ideological differences in the use of gendered cues in categorizing sexual orientation
In the present research, we investigated whether, because of differences in cognitive style, liberals and conservatives would differ in the process of categorizing individuals into a perceptually ambiguous group. In 3 studies, we examined whether conservatives were more likely than liberals to rely on gender inversion cues (e.g., feminine = gay) when categorizing male faces as gay vs. straight, and the accuracy implications of differential cue us…
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…
Cultural Neuroscience: A Historical Introduction and Overview
The integration of cognitive neuroscience with the study of culture emerged from independent ascensions among both fields in the early 1990s. This marriage of the two previously unconnected areas of inquiry has generated a variety of empirical and theoretical works that have provided unique insights to both partners that might have otherwise gone overlooked. Here, I provide a brief historical introduction to the emergence of cultural neuroscience…
Perceptions of personality in text-based media and OSN: A meta-analysis
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 …
Individual Differences in Perceptions of Gay Men’s Sexual Role Preferences from Facial Cues
Facial Trustworthiness Predicts Extreme Criminal-Sentencing Outcomes
Untrustworthy faces incur negative judgments across numerous domains. Existing work in this area has focused on situations in which the target’s trustworthiness is relevant to the judgment (e.g., criminal verdicts and economic games). Yet in the present studies, we found that people also overgeneralized trustworthiness in criminal-sentencing decisions when trustworthiness should not be judicially relevant, and they did so even for the most extrem…
Emotions facilitate the communication of ambiguous group memberships
It is well known that emotions intersect with obvious social categories (e.g., race), influencing both how targets are categorized and the emotions that are read from their faces. Here, we examined the influence of emotional expression on the perception of less obvious group memberships for which, in the absence of obvious and stable physical markers, emotion may serve as a major avenue for group categorization and identification. Specifically, w…
Thin slices of child personality: Perceptual, situational, and behavioral contributions
The present study examined whether thin-slice ratings of child personality serve as a resource-efficient and theoretically valid measurement of child personality traits. We extended theoretical work on the observability, perceptual accuracy, and situational consistency of childhood personality traits by examining intersource and interjudge agreement, cross-situational consistency, and convergent, divergent, and predictive validity of thin-slice r…
The big man has a big mouth: Mouth width correlates with perceived leadership ability and actual leadership performance
Non-Western Homosexuality
Psychology (70 works) · Social Psychology (67 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (50 works) · Perception (37 works) · Developmental psychology (35 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (27 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (23 works) · Social perception (23 works) · Cognitive psychology (22 works) · Social Psychology (22 works)