Facial make-up elicits positive attitudes at the implicit level: Evidence from the Implicit Association Test

Three experiments tested whether the use of facial make-up elicits positive or negative implicit attitudes. Students in psychology, business, and aesthetics performed a series of Implicit Association Tests (IAT) measuring the link between portrayed women wearing or not wearing make-up and high versus low status professions, pleasant versus unpleasant words, and positive versus negative personality traits. Results showed that make-up was associated with positive traits and high-status professions at the implicit level. They are discussed in relation with previous findings indicating a negative influence of make-up on impression formation with exactly the same photographs and similar subject samples. [145] --------------[146 ] INTRODUCTION Whereas social psychology has intensively examined how people form impressions about one another, the impact of cosmetic use on such impressions has not received much attention. This is surprising because, as reported by Cash and Cash (1982), U.S. consumers spent billions of dollars on cosmetics as a means to develop and/or maintain an attractive appearance. There is no doubt that, in the users' eyes, cosmetic use increases their attractiveness and therefore improves how others perceive them. Is this use always beneficial, however? Huguet, Croizet, and Richetin (in press) pointed out that the small number of studies in this area produced inconsistent findings. As early as 1952, McKeachie reported data indicating that cosmetic use can result in negative impressions. Young male students rated young women (students) as more frivolous, less talkative, more anxious, less conscientious, and more interested in the opposite sex when wearing make-up than when not. Thirty years later, Graham and Jouhar (1981) reported positive effects of cosmetics. Male and female participants rated color photographs of four female targets of average physical attractiveness on several traits related to appearance and personality. With facial make-up, the targets were rated as being cleaner, more tidy, feminine, physically attractive, and mature looking (appearance ratings) as well as being more secure, sociable, interesting, poised, confident, organized and popular (personality ratings). As suggested by Graham and Jouhar, to the extent that the use of cosmetics induced more favorable impressions on the appearance ratings, its positive influence on the personality ratings could be the indirect effect of an increase in the target's Physical Attractiveness (PA). We (Huguet et al., in press) tested this idea by the means of mediational analyses and found that cosmetic use (i.e., ordinary facial make-up) had a direct effect on perceived personality, independent of PA enhancement. This direct effect was also suggested by Graham and Jouhar as an alternative hypothesis of a positive cosmetic stereotype, which would be independent of the PA or "what-is-beautiful-is-good" stereotype (see Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972; Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991; Feingold, 1992). In our previous investigation, however, make-up had a negative (not a positive) impact on impression formation. More specifically, undergraduates from three different academic areas (i.e., Psychology, Business, and Aesthetics) were presented with photographs (on a computer screen) of young and older female stimulus wearing or not wearing ordinary facial make-up. They were asked to rate them for physical attractiveness and on a number of personality traits (the presence or absence of make-up was never emphasized by the experimenter). For the three group of participants, make-up facilitated the attribution of negative traits (i.e., vain, unfaithful and shallow) and inhibited the attribution of positive traits (i.e., kind and honest), especially for the young targets. Of particular interest here, Graham and Jouhar selected professional business people (i.e., directors, secretaries, and personal managers) as participants. And a close examination of past relevant studies revealed that the negative effects of cosmetics were typically observed with Psychology undergraduates (e.g., Workman & Johnson, 1991). In our previous investigation, the negative impact of make-up on impression formation was indeed stronger with the Psychology undergraduates than with the other participants (from Business and Aesthetic schools), especially those studying Aesthetics who are indeed trained to use and value cosmetics. Consistent with this, participants' explicit attitude toward facial cosmetics was less positive in the Psychology group than in the Aesthetic group. It is therefore possible that cosmetic use has a different meaning for different social groups (or for different age groups), and that the selection of different populations is, at least in part, the cause of the inconsistency in this literature. In the present paper, it is assumed that this inconsistency also stems from the fact that past relevant research relied exclusively on explicit measures of judgment, which are known to be opened to various bias (e.g., demand characteristics, impression management, see Orne, 1962; Tedeschi, Schlenker & Bonoma, 1971). No research so far has measured the impact of cosmetic use unobtrusively. In order to fill in this gap, the present studies relied on the Implicit Association Test (IAT, Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz, 1998). Our goal was to determine whether facial make-up is associated with a positive or a negative attitude at the implicit level. [146] --------------[147 ] IAT AND ATTITUDE TOWARD COSMETICS The IAT is generally viewed as offering direct access to people's attitudinal unconscious (Greenwald, Banaji, Rudman, Farnham, Nosek & Mellott, 2002). As such, this test may reveal attitudes and other automatic associations even for subjects who prefer not to express those attitudes. As noted by Greenwald et al. (1998), implicit attitudes are manifest as actions or judgments that are under the control of automatically activated evaluation. The IAT is therefore similar in intent to cognitive priming procedures for measuring automatic affect or attitude (e.g., Bargh, Chaiken, Govender, & Pratto, 1992; Fazio, 1993). In the first and second step of this test, participants simply indicate via a motor action whether a stimulus (e.g., photo of human faces) does or does not belong to a given category (e.g., Black vs. White people), then whether words are positively or negatively connoted. These two tasks are interspersed at step 3, in which both types of stimuli (i.e., faces and words) occur on alternate trials. At step 4, participants learn a reversal of response assignment for the face categorization task (i.e., people perceived as Black are now assigned to the opposite key). Finally, at step 5, they perform a task combining the one from step 2 (i.e., word categorization not changed in response assignment) with the reversed face categorization task from step 4. When participants respond under time pressure, they typically produce higher response latencies and more errors if stimulus and response are incompatible than if they are compatible. This performance difference constitutes the indication of the implicit attitude towards the target categories (e.g., Black or White) and has been labeled the IAT effect. The IAT has been massively used to reveal negative implicit attitudes toward different social categories (e.g., Greenwald et al, 1998; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000; Karpinski & Hilton, 2001). In line with our example, White participants associate "pleasant" words and typical White names more readily than they associate "pleasant" words and typical Black names. The differential ease with which pleasant words are associated with typical White names rather than Black names reflects an automatic preference for the racial category "White" relative to "Black," that is, a biased racial attitude. Despite the apparent robustness of automatic attitudes biases, they may be quite malleable to contextual influences (Richeson & Ambady, 2003). For instance, imagining an agentic woman reduced automatic gender stereotyping (Blair, Ma, & Lenton, 2001), and exposure to a Black experimenter reduced White's automatic racial biases (see also Rudman, Ashmore, & Gary, 2001). Dasgupta and Greenwald (2001) also found that White and Asian American participants revealed less implicit prejudice regarding Blacks during an IAT if they had recently been exposed to admired Blacks (e.g., Michael Jordan) and disliked Whites (e.g., Jeffrey Dahmer), compared to recent exposure to disliked Blacks (e.g., Mike Tyson) and admired Whites (e.g., John F. Kennedy). In addition, Richeson and Ambady (2003) provided evidence for the influence of situational power on automatic racial prejudice. Specifically, Whites assigned to the highpower role of a superior of a Black individual revealed more racial bias than Whites assigned to the lower-power role of a subordinate. Thus, although they are typically activated without conscious awareness, the prejudicial attitudes and stereotypical associations revealed by the IAT are not automatic in the sense of being inevitable. Instead, they can be disabled and/or overridden by contextual factors (see also Besner, 2001; Huguet, Galvaing, Monteil, & Dumas, 1999; Huguet, Dumas, & Monteil, in press, for a similar argument about automatic lexicalsemantic analyses of isolated words). With this in mind, we performed three IAT experiments using the same photographs of female faces wearing or not wearing make-up as previously (Huguet et al., in press). In order to know whether make-up is implicitly associated with a negative or a positive evaluation, we used these photographs in combination with pleasant versus unpleasant words (e.g., sun vs. poison; see Study 1), with positively versus negatively connoted personality traits (e.g., sociable vs. stupid; see Study 2 and Study 3), and with words related to high-versus low-status professions (e.g., judge vs. hairdresser, all three studies)