Morgan, M. G., Bjornsdottir, R. T., Alaei, R., Lee, A., Ma, M., Krendl, A., & Rule, N. O. (In prep). Facial appearance elicits stable and valid social judgments across the lifespan.
Social perception research evidences people's remarkable ability to form reliable judgements about one another, but we don't yet know whether these judgments remain consistent across individuals' lives. For instance, if a person is seen as extroverted in their adolescence, will they also be seen as extroverted in older adulthood? Here, we answer this question using a large, novel stimulus set of 165 older adults who provided standardized photos of themselves at six life stages ranging from childhood (< 10 years old) to current age (> 65 years old). Perceivers formed personality and group membership (SES, political orientation, religious affiliation) judgments from these photos. These judgments demonstrated remarkable accuracy throughout the lifespan, but more importantly, they also demonstrated consistent social perceptual biases that may compound unequal treatment over the course of individuals' lives.Morgan, M. G. & Rule, N. O. (Under Review). Person perception from the extrapersonal.
People leave traces of who they are in the things around them; we can tell a lot about others from the way the dress, the rooms they decorate, art they create, and the food they cook. Research shows that others can often use these clues to make reliable judgments about others’ identities, such as their gender, personality, and political affiliation. In this paper, we propose a new theory explaining why this happens. We argue that people naturally shape the products, objects, and spaces in their lives to reflect how they see themselves and how they want to be seen by others. In turn, observers learn to use these “extrapersonal” cues to form social impressions and guide their behavior. Our framework explains how people inject evidence of their identities into their extrapersonal features and how these extrapersonal features influence social interactions, purchasing behavior, and identity signaling.Morgan, M. G., & Rule, N. O. (In prep). People accurately categorize gender from creative products.
We explored how people pick up on subtle gender signals embedded within creative products such as films and food. Across 3 studies and 20 experiments, people discerned whether a film director or chef was a man or woman from only brief exposure to their work. These judgments were possible because these creators films and dishes contained small but consistent patterns linked to gender. For example, female directors feature more women and and more gender-atypical actors in their films (i.e., feminine men, masculine women), while dishes created by male chefs were perceived as saltier, aligning with food-gender stereotypes. These findings suggest that people unintentionally leave traces of themselves in the products they make, allowing others to draw social inferences from the physical world around them.Morgan, M. G., Golubickis, M., Jalalian, P., Sharma, Y., Selvaraj, E. S., Rule, N. O., Macrae, C. N. (In press). Stereotypic beliefs dominate reversal learning. Scientific Reports.
Bjornsdottir, R. T., Morgan, M., Jónsdóttir, H. L. H., Garðarsdóttir, R. B., & Rule, N. O. (2025). Consistent facial cues to social class across two different western contexts. European Journal of Social Psychology, 55(4), 692–707. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.3163
Morgan, M. G., & Rule, N. O. (2024). Accuracy, bias, and overgeneralization: Perceived aggression guides threat detection and punishment of female criminal offenders. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 49(2), 227–248. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-024-00475-8
Morgan, M. G., Tian, L., & Rule, N. O. (2025). City slicker or country bumpkin? Distinguishing urban and rural residents from subtle facial cues. European Journal of Social Psychology, 56(2), 350–366. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.70042