Eric Hehman
Biographic Data
| ID | 1736364 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric Hehman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric |
| FAMILY NAME | Hehman |
| SIGNATURE | HEHMAN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | McGill University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2227-1517 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 218 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Differences in Variance, Skewness, and Kurtosis Can Account for Differences in Binary Outcomes
When researchers consider the relation between continuous predictors (e.g., perceived threat) and binary outcomes (e.g., being stopped by police), they typically adopt a means-focused approach, (a) attributing observed differences in binary outcomes to expected mean differences in continuous predictors and/or (b) predicting expected differences in binary outcomes using observed mean differences in continuous predictors. Because non-mean distribut…
Basic Psychological Needs Are Associated With Engagement and Hate Term Use in Extremist Chatrooms
Extremist groups frequently leverage online spaces in recruitment and organization efforts. This research assessed how basic psychological need expression among users of extremist chatrooms was related to forum engagement and hate term use. ∼20,000,000 posts from ∼90,000 users on 233 Discord chatrooms were scraped from a publicly available database. Using a natural language processing approach, users received scores on three needs based on semant…
The environment impressions model
7,290), the present research identifies and validates four factors underlying the impressions people form of the environments they live in and navigate every day: density, desirability, light, and temperature. U.S. participants qualitatively described environments (Study 1), and both U.S. and U.K. participants rated environments on those characteristics (Studies 2-4). Exploratory factor analyses identified the factors underlying environment impre…
Local Legislation is Associated With Regional Transgender Attitudes
Using a newly developed measure of implicit transgender attitudes, we investigate the association between state-level antitransgender policies and individual-level attitudes about transgender people among residents. In a large sample of U.S. participants ( N = 211,133), we find that individuals living in states with more discriminatory policies against transgender people (e.g., not allowing changes to one’s gender identity on official identity pa…
Assessing the Point at Which Averages Are Stable: A Tutorial in the Context of Impression Formation
Across many diverse areas of research, it is common to average a series of observations, and to use these averages in subsequent analyses. Research using this approach faces the challenge of knowing when these averages are “stable.” Meaning, to what extent do averages change when additional observations are included? Using averages that are not stable introduces error into any analysis, and knowing the point of stability can inform research desig…
A Tutorial on Representational Similarity Analysis for Research in Social Cognition
Representational similarity analysis (RSA) is a simple and widely used technique for comparing relationships between diverse types of measures using a common set of elements. For instance, RSA allows researchers to compare brain and behavioral measures of the same set of participants, or response patterns to the same set of stimuli across different conditions. This technique effectively quantifies relationships between complex, high-dimensional m…
Prejudice and stereotypes at regional and individual levels: Related but distinct
Exploring how psychological constructs and their outcomes vary across geographic regions is a rapidly expanding area of research, yet fundamental questions remain. Can constructs designed to describe individual variation in attitudes be interpreted in the same way when aggregated to regional levels? To what extent are they related or distinct? We tested the relationship between individual and regional attitudes across four studies in the domain o…
Race in the eye of the beholder: Decomposing perceiver- and target-level variation in perceived racial prototypicality
Everyday Perceiver-Context Influences on Impression Formation: No Evidence of Consistent Effects
Facial impressions (e.g., trustworthy, intelligent) vary considerably across different perceivers and targets. However, nearly all existing research comes from participants evaluating faces on a computer screen in a lab or office environment. We explored whether social perceptions could additionally be influenced by perceivers’ experiential factors that vary in daily life: mood, environment, physiological state, and psychological situations. To t…
Implicit bias predicts less willingness and less frequent adoption of Black children more than explicit bias
In the United States, prospective adoptive parents often express preferences related to race. In two studies, we examined whether implicit racial bias against Black people may contribute to disparities in much less willingness to adopt Black children. The first study (N = 510) assessed individuals’ implicit racial bias and their willingness to adopt a Black child. The second study (N = 2,001,652) used U.S. state-level implicit racial bias to pred…
Asian Men and Black Women Hold Weaker Race–Gender Associations: Evidence From the United States and China
Prior work finds a consistent association between race and gender: People associate Asian with female and Black with male. We used mouse-tracking to examine whether different U.S. racial/ethnic groups hold this same association (Study 1) and compared Asian-American participants to ethnically Chinese participants in China (Study 2). In Study 1, White and Hispanic participants showed the expected “race is gendered” effect, and the strength of the e…
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…
Consensus Enables Accurate Social Judgments
Ubiquitous to theories of social perception is an assumed relationship between an attribute’s (e.g., intelligence) “signal” and judgment accuracy, with accuracy impossible without the presence and consensual use of signal. Yet this foundational assumption remains untested. Our investigation focused on consensus (quantified using intraclass correlations, ICCs), which should suggest signal availability, according to theories of accurate social perc…
Stereotypes shape response competition when forming impressions
Dynamic models of impression formation posit that bottom-up factors (e.g., a target's facial features) and top-down factors (e.g., perceiver knowledge of stereotypes) continuously interact over time until a stable categorization or impression emerges. Most previous work on the dynamic resolution of judgments over time has focused on either categorization (e.g., "is this person male/female?") or specific trait impressions (e.g., "is this person tr…
Using Environmental Features to Maximize Prediction of Regional Intergroup Bias
The present research adopts a data-driven approach to identify how characteristics of the environment are related to different types of regional in-group biases. After consolidating a large data set of environmental attributes ( N = 813), we used modern model selection techniques (i.e., elastic net regularization) to develop parsimonious models for regional implicit and explicit measures of race-, religious-, sexuality-, age-, and health-based in…
The relevance appraisal matrix: Evaluating others’ relevance
People seek to detect who facilitates and who impedes their goal pursuit. The resulting relevance appraisals of opportunity and threat, respectively, can strongly shape subsequent social judgment and behavior. However, important questions about the nature of relevance appraisals remain unanswered: Are relevance appraisals unidimensional or multidimensional? Are people evaluated as generally posing opportunities and/or threats, or as dynamically r…
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…
Trait knowledge forms a common structure across social cognition
Same-sex marriage legalization associated with reduced implicit and explicit antigay bias
The current research tested whether the passing of government legislation, signaling the prevailing attitudes of the local majority, was associated with changes in citizens’ attitudes. Specifically, with ∼1 million responses over a 12-y window, we tested whether state-by-state same-sex marriage legislation was associated with decreases in antigay implicit and explicit bias. Results across five operationalizations consistently provide support for …
Perceiver and target characteristics contribute to impression formation differently across race and gender
Social impressions arise from characteristics of both perceivers and targets. However, empirical research in the domain of impression formation has yet to quantify the extent to which perceiver and target characteristics uniquely contribute to impressions across group boundaries (e.g., race, gender). To what extent does an impression arise from "our mind" versus "a target's face", and does this process differ for impressions across race and gende…
Disproportionate Use of Lethal Force in Policing Is Associated With Regional Racial Biases of Residents
Due to a lack of data, the demographic and psychological factors associated with lethal force by police officers have remained insufficiently explored. We develop the first predictive models of lethal force by integrating crowd-sourced and fact-checked lethal force databases with regional demographics and measures of geolocated implicit and explicit racial biases collected from 2,156,053 residents across the United States. Results indicate that o…
States higher in racial bias spend less on disabled medicaid enrollees
Construct Validation in Social and Personality Research: Current Practice and Recommendations
The verity of results about a psychological construct hinges on the validity of its measurement, making construct validation a fundamental methodology to the scientific process. We reviewed a representative sample of articles published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology for construct validity evidence. We report that latent variable measurement, in which responses to items are used to represent a construct, is pervasive in social…
The unique contributions of perceiver and target characteristics in person perception
Models of person perception have long asserted that our impressions of others are guided by characteristics of both the target and perceiver. However, research has not yet quantified to what extent perceivers and targets contribute to different impressions. This quantification is theoretically critical, as it addresses how much an impression arises from "our minds" versus "others' faces." Here, we apply cross-classified random effects models to a…
Blacks’ Death Rate Due to Circulatory Diseases Is Positively Related to Whites’ Explicit Racial Bias: A Nationwide Investigation Using Project Implicit
Perceptions of racial bias have been linked to poorer circulatory health among Blacks compared with Whites. However, little is known about whether Whites' actual racial bias contributes to this racial disparity in health. We compiled racial-bias data from 1,391,632 Whites and examined whether racial bias in a given county predicted Black-White disparities in circulatory-disease risk (access to health care, diagnosis of a circulatory disease; Stud…
Blacks’ Death Rate Due to Circulatory Diseases Is Positively Related to Whites’ Explicit Racial Bias: A Nationwide Investigation Using Project Implicit
Perceptions of racial bias have been linked to poorer circulatory health among Blacks compared with Whites. However, little is known about whether Whites' actual racial bias contributes to this racial disparity in health. We compiled racial-bias data from 1,391,632 Whites and examined whether racial bias in a given county predicted Black-White disparities in circulatory-disease risk (access to health care, diagnosis of a circulatory disease; Stud…
The unique contributions of perceiver and target characteristics in person perception
Models of person perception have long asserted that our impressions of others are guided by characteristics of both the target and perceiver. However, research has not yet quantified to what extent perceivers and targets contribute to different impressions. This quantification is theoretically critical, as it addresses how much an impression arises from "our minds" versus "others' faces." Here, we apply cross-classified random effects models to a…
The Gendered Face of Partisan Politics: Consequences of Facial Sex Typicality for Vote Choice
Facial cues are consequential for voters' behavior at the polls. Yet the facial cues that are associated with vote choice remain under-examined. We predicted that vote choice judgments rely, in part, on the sex typicality of facial cues (i.e., the degree of facial masculinity and femininity) that vary as a function of candidate gender and partisan identification. Stimuli included image pairs of winners and runners-up in the elections for the 111t…
Racial bias is associated with ingroup death rate for Blacks and Whites: Insights from Project Implicit
Where the division lies: Common ingroup identity moderates the cross-race facial-recognition effect
States higher in racial bias spend less on disabled medicaid enrollees
Advanced mouse-tracking analytic techniques for enhancing psychological science
Computer mouse-tracking is a relatively recently developed behavioral methodology that can contribute unique insight into a wide variety of psychological phenomena. By recording mouse movements en route to specific responses on a screen, researchers glean continuous information about tentative commitments to multiple response alternatives over time. This approach yields a richness of data that can be fully explored with a variety of sophisticated…
Perceiver and target characteristics contribute to impression formation differently across race and gender
Social impressions arise from characteristics of both perceivers and targets. However, empirical research in the domain of impression formation has yet to quantify the extent to which perceiver and target characteristics uniquely contribute to impressions across group boundaries (e.g., race, gender). To what extent does an impression arise from "our mind" versus "a target's face", and does this process differ for impressions across race and gende…
Picking teams: When dominant facial structure is preferred
Evaluations of presidential performance: Race, prejudice, and perceptions of Americanism
Enhancing static facial features increases intimidation
Multiple group membership influences face-recognition: Recall and neurological evidence
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…
Trait knowledge forms a common structure across social cognition
The relevance appraisal matrix: Evaluating others’ relevance
People seek to detect who facilitates and who impedes their goal pursuit. The resulting relevance appraisals of opportunity and threat, respectively, can strongly shape subsequent social judgment and behavior. However, important questions about the nature of relevance appraisals remain unanswered: Are relevance appraisals unidimensional or multidimensional? Are people evaluated as generally posing opportunities and/or threats, or as dynamically r…
Warmth and competence: A content analysis of photographs depicting American presidents
The current research examines whether images presented alongside online articles might systematically vary in how political targets are presented. We focus our analyses on how presidents who either share or do not share political orientations with Internet media outlets are portrayed along the dimensions of warmth and competence, qualities highly prized in leadership and effectively conveyed in facial images. Four hundred twenty-two images from f…
Assessing the Point at Which Averages Are Stable: A Tutorial in the Context of Impression Formation
Across many diverse areas of research, it is common to average a series of observations, and to use these averages in subsequent analyses. Research using this approach faces the challenge of knowing when these averages are “stable.” Meaning, to what extent do averages change when additional observations are included? Using averages that are not stable introduces error into any analysis, and knowing the point of stability can inform research desig…
Prejudice and stereotypes at regional and individual levels: Related but distinct
Exploring how psychological constructs and their outcomes vary across geographic regions is a rapidly expanding area of research, yet fundamental questions remain. Can constructs designed to describe individual variation in attitudes be interpreted in the same way when aggregated to regional levels? To what extent are they related or distinct? We tested the relationship between individual and regional attitudes across four studies in the domain o…
Where the division lies: Common ingroup identity moderates the cross-race facial-recognition effect
Evaluations of presidential performance: Race, prejudice, and perceptions of Americanism
Multiple group membership influences face-recognition: Recall and neurological evidence
Warmth and competence: A content analysis of photographs depicting American presidents
The current research examines whether images presented alongside online articles might systematically vary in how political targets are presented. We focus our analyses on how presidents who either share or do not share political orientations with Internet media outlets are portrayed along the dimensions of warmth and competence, qualities highly prized in leadership and effectively conveyed in facial images. Four hundred twenty-two images from f…
Enhancing static facial features increases intimidation
Early Processing of Gendered Facial Cues Predicts the Electoral Success of Female Politicians
This research examined how the typicality of gender cues in politicians’ faces related to their electoral success. Previous research has shown that faces with subtle gender-atypical cues elicit cognitive competition between male and female categories, which perceivers resolve during face perception. To assess whether this competition adversely impacted politicians’ electoral success, participants categorized the gender of politicians’ faces in a …
Advanced mouse-tracking analytic techniques for enhancing psychological science
Computer mouse-tracking is a relatively recently developed behavioral methodology that can contribute unique insight into a wide variety of psychological phenomena. By recording mouse movements en route to specific responses on a screen, researchers glean continuous information about tentative commitments to multiple response alternatives over time. This approach yields a richness of data that can be fully explored with a variety of sophisticated…
Picking teams: When dominant facial structure is preferred
Blacks’ Death Rate Due to Circulatory Diseases Is Positively Related to Whites’ Explicit Racial Bias: A Nationwide Investigation Using Project Implicit
Perceptions of racial bias have been linked to poorer circulatory health among Blacks compared with Whites. However, little is known about whether Whites' actual racial bias contributes to this racial disparity in health. We compiled racial-bias data from 1,391,632 Whites and examined whether racial bias in a given county predicted Black-White disparities in circulatory-disease risk (access to health care, diagnosis of a circulatory disease; Stud…
The Gendered Face of Partisan Politics: Consequences of Facial Sex Typicality for Vote Choice
Facial cues are consequential for voters' behavior at the polls. Yet the facial cues that are associated with vote choice remain under-examined. We predicted that vote choice judgments rely, in part, on the sex typicality of facial cues (i.e., the degree of facial masculinity and femininity) that vary as a function of candidate gender and partisan identification. Stimuli included image pairs of winners and runners-up in the elections for the 111t…
Racial bias is associated with ingroup death rate for Blacks and Whites: Insights from Project Implicit
Construct Validation in Social and Personality Research: Current Practice and Recommendations
The verity of results about a psychological construct hinges on the validity of its measurement, making construct validation a fundamental methodology to the scientific process. We reviewed a representative sample of articles published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology for construct validity evidence. We report that latent variable measurement, in which responses to items are used to represent a construct, is pervasive in social…
The unique contributions of perceiver and target characteristics in person perception
Models of person perception have long asserted that our impressions of others are guided by characteristics of both the target and perceiver. However, research has not yet quantified to what extent perceivers and targets contribute to different impressions. This quantification is theoretically critical, as it addresses how much an impression arises from "our minds" versus "others' faces." Here, we apply cross-classified random effects models to a…
Disproportionate Use of Lethal Force in Policing Is Associated With Regional Racial Biases of Residents
Due to a lack of data, the demographic and psychological factors associated with lethal force by police officers have remained insufficiently explored. We develop the first predictive models of lethal force by integrating crowd-sourced and fact-checked lethal force databases with regional demographics and measures of geolocated implicit and explicit racial biases collected from 2,156,053 residents across the United States. Results indicate that o…
States higher in racial bias spend less on disabled medicaid enrollees
Same-sex marriage legalization associated with reduced implicit and explicit antigay bias
The current research tested whether the passing of government legislation, signaling the prevailing attitudes of the local majority, was associated with changes in citizens’ attitudes. Specifically, with ∼1 million responses over a 12-y window, we tested whether state-by-state same-sex marriage legislation was associated with decreases in antigay implicit and explicit bias. Results across five operationalizations consistently provide support for …
Perceiver and target characteristics contribute to impression formation differently across race and gender
Social impressions arise from characteristics of both perceivers and targets. However, empirical research in the domain of impression formation has yet to quantify the extent to which perceiver and target characteristics uniquely contribute to impressions across group boundaries (e.g., race, gender). To what extent does an impression arise from "our mind" versus "a target's face", and does this process differ for impressions across race and gende…
Trait knowledge forms a common structure across social cognition
Using Environmental Features to Maximize Prediction of Regional Intergroup Bias
The present research adopts a data-driven approach to identify how characteristics of the environment are related to different types of regional in-group biases. After consolidating a large data set of environmental attributes ( N = 813), we used modern model selection techniques (i.e., elastic net regularization) to develop parsimonious models for regional implicit and explicit measures of race-, religious-, sexuality-, age-, and health-based in…
The relevance appraisal matrix: Evaluating others’ relevance
People seek to detect who facilitates and who impedes their goal pursuit. The resulting relevance appraisals of opportunity and threat, respectively, can strongly shape subsequent social judgment and behavior. However, important questions about the nature of relevance appraisals remain unanswered: Are relevance appraisals unidimensional or multidimensional? Are people evaluated as generally posing opportunities and/or threats, or as dynamically r…
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…
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…
Consensus Enables Accurate Social Judgments
Ubiquitous to theories of social perception is an assumed relationship between an attribute’s (e.g., intelligence) “signal” and judgment accuracy, with accuracy impossible without the presence and consensual use of signal. Yet this foundational assumption remains untested. Our investigation focused on consensus (quantified using intraclass correlations, ICCs), which should suggest signal availability, according to theories of accurate social perc…
Stereotypes shape response competition when forming impressions
Dynamic models of impression formation posit that bottom-up factors (e.g., a target's facial features) and top-down factors (e.g., perceiver knowledge of stereotypes) continuously interact over time until a stable categorization or impression emerges. Most previous work on the dynamic resolution of judgments over time has focused on either categorization (e.g., "is this person male/female?") or specific trait impressions (e.g., "is this person tr…
Everyday Perceiver-Context Influences on Impression Formation: No Evidence of Consistent Effects
Facial impressions (e.g., trustworthy, intelligent) vary considerably across different perceivers and targets. However, nearly all existing research comes from participants evaluating faces on a computer screen in a lab or office environment. We explored whether social perceptions could additionally be influenced by perceivers’ experiential factors that vary in daily life: mood, environment, physiological state, and psychological situations. To t…
Psychology (30 works) · Social Psychology (26 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (16 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (16 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Cognitive psychology (12 works) · Perception (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Political science (8 works) · Social perception (8 works)