News Finding: Together, these findings suggest that competence and masculinity are correlated components of first impressions based on appearance.
Paper Finding: Thus, the results show that confidence and masculinity cues are important ingredients of competence impressions-ingredients that cannot be explained as a by-product of attractiveness.
News Context: In another online experiment, the researchers discovered a clear gender bias: When participants were asked to identify faces as either male or female, they tended to rate more competent faces as male and less competent faces as female. Together, these findings suggest that competence and masculinity are correlated components of first impressions based on appearance. Again, they found a gender bias in first impressions: As male faces increased in masculinity, so did their perceived competence.
Paper Context: It follows that the variance in the competence impressions cannot be attributed to the halo effect of attractiveness, which is a significant natural confound of competence impressions. Thus, the results show that confidence and masculinity cues are important ingredients of competence impressions-ingredients that cannot be explained as a by-product of attractiveness. Masculinity cues are strongly related to perceptions of gender, which suggests the presence of gender biases in competence impressions.