Journal Article | Course Paper

769

䉷2012 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc. ●Vol. 39 ●December 2012

A Tiger and a President: Imperceptible

Celebrity Facial Cues Influence Trust

and Preference

ROBIN J. TANNER

AHREUM MAENG

Neuroscientific research suggests that the brain has evolved specific capabilities

enabling automatic social judgments of others to be made based on facial prop-

erties alone. However, little research in marketing has considered the conse-

quences of how facial imagery is automatically processed. We explore automatic

perceptions of familiarity by using morphing software to digitally combine unfamiliar

faces with those of Tiger Woods and George Bush. Despite a complete lack of

conscious recognition, trustworthiness ratings of the composite faces are clearly

influenced by the celebrities in question. This appears to be due to implicit rec-

ognition being sufficient for individuals to automatically access their own summary

valence judgments of either Woods or Bush. Alternative explanations based on a

perceptual-fluency account, or implicit recognition sufficient to perceive specific

trait ratings, are ruled out. These findings suggest that the marketing practice of

digitally manipulating the attractiveness of facial imagery risks overlooking the

important influence of familiarity.

Human faces are arguably the most important visual stimuli

we perceive. They are quite staggeringly complex and

represent an exceptionally rich source of social information,

which we have evolved to be extremely adept at decoding

(Engell, Haxby, and Todorov 2007). For example, faces not

only reveal a tremendous amount of information about our

underlying emotions, but the mere adoption of certain facial

expressions is sufficient to moderate the underlying physiology

and subjective experience of emotion (Ekman 1992). Further-

more, we begin to mimic facial expressions soon after birth

(Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson 1993), infer movement tra-

Robin J. Tanner is assistant professor of marketing, Wisconsin School of

Business, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 975 University Avenue, Madison,

WI 53706 (rtanner@bus.wisc.edu). Ahreum Maeng is a PhD candidate in mar-

keting, Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 975

University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706 (amaeng@bus.wisc.edu). Correspon-

dence should be sent to the first author. The authors thank the Fuqua brown

bag reading group, Tanya Chartrand, the editor, the associate editor, and the

three reviewers for suggestions that significantly improved the article. This work

was supported by a grant from the UW Madison Graduate School to the first

author.

Ann McGill served as editor and Ravi Dhar served as associate editor for this

article.

Electronically published March 21, 2012

jectories and intentions from peoples’ gazes (Nummenmaa,

Hyona, and Hietanen 2009), and are astonishingly adept at

rapidly identifying angry faces in crowds (Hansen and Hansen

1988). In fact, evidence from cognitive, developmental, and

evolutionary psychology, as well as from cognitive neu-

roscience, supports the face-specificity hypothesis, which

suggests that the face represents a “special” (and possibly

unique) class of stimuli whose processing is handled by

discrete and specialized neural circuits (Kanwisher and

Yovel 2006).

Indeed, converging evidence suggests that the human brain

has evolved specific capabilities that enable automatic social

judgments of others (such as how trustworthy they are) to be

made based on facial properties alone (Critchley et al. 2000;

Engell et al. 2007; Winston et al. 2002). That humans have

evolved to be highly sophisticated (and automatic) interpreters

of facial information has potentially profound implications

for marketers. After all, from decorative models in cosmetics

ads to celebrity endorsers of sodas, facial imagery is nearly

ever-present across all forms of marketing communication. It

is thus rather surprising how little research in marketing has

directly explored the implications of how people automati-

cally code (and respond to) facial stimuli.

While there has certainly been a growing awareness

among marketing researchers that environmental cues can

automatically influence consumer behavior, this work has

770 JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH

to date largely focused on examining the effects of lexical

and brand primes on specific goals and traits (Chartrand

et al. 2008; Fitzsimons, Chartrand, and Fitzsimons 2008).

Although automatic responses to some more overtly social

cues (such as the presence of interpersonal mimicry; Tanner

et al. 2008) have been studied, relatively little research has

specifically examined automatic evaluation of facial cues. The

research that does exist has tended to focus on certain effects

of specific expressions, such as in research on emotional con-

tagion (Howard and Gengler 2001; Small and Verochi 2009)

rather than chronic (emotionally neutral) features of the face.

However, given the emerging neuropsychological evidence

that our brains are essentially hardwired to automatically pro-

cess facial information, we believe that research on automatic

processing of facial imagery merits considerably broader at-

tention from marketing scholars.

The current research was conceived to explore one aspect

of automatic facial processing that has the potential to be

highly relevant to marketers. Specifically, we are interested

in whether perceptions of the trustworthiness of unfamiliar

faces (i.e., of apparently unknown individuals) can be in-

fluenced by incorporating subtle facial cues of familiar peo-

ple into the faces in question. This question was motivated,

in part, by the finding from the facial morphing literature

that subtly (and imperceptibly) incorporating elements of an

individual’s own face into an otherwise unfamiliar face in-

creases reported trust in, and/or preference for, the unfamiliar

face (Bailenson et al. 2009; DeBruine 2002). Importantly,

since the self is simultaneously both similar and familiar, it

is unclear from this stream of research whether a similarity-

or familiarity-based process underlies the observed positive

effects. A primary goal of our research was to better un-

derstand these competing explanations. We do this by re-

lying on faces that are familiar but not similar to those of

our participants. Specifically, we investigate the effect of

subtly incorporating elements of celebrity images into oth-

erwise unfamiliar faces.

The remainder of this article is structured as follows. First,

we provide a brief overview of research on automatic facial

processing, which suggests that perceptions of trust can be

automatically determined based on facial cues alone. Sec-

ond, we review the existing finding from the digital morph-

ing literature that subtle incorporation of self-images into

unfamiliar faces increases perceived trust in the individuals

pictured, and we discuss both similarity- and familiarity-

based explanations that could underlie this effect. Finally,

we present four studies that explore the effects of morphing

unknown faces with highly familiar celebrity images. These

studies enable us to make the following claims. First, morph-

ing unknown faces to contain imperceptible cues of familiar

individuals can lead to similar positive effects on perceived

trustworthiness as does self-morphing. Second, this effect

appears to be driven by implicit recognition of the specific

familiar individual concerned rather than by either a more

general fluency effect or by some aspect of their facial struc-

ture that they may share with others. Third, this implicit

recognition appears sufficient for a broad approach/avoid

valence pertaining to the familiar individual to be perceived

but is insufficient for specific trait assessments of them to

be accessed from memory.

AUTOMATIC FACIAL PROCESSING

Accurate social judgments have in all likelihood been a

significant determinant of human survival and indeed of

the survival of our primate ancestors (Winston et al. 2002).

For example, from an evolutionary biology perspective, the

ability to quickly discern whether a stranger might be hostile

and/or untrustworthy could significantly enhance an indi-

vidual’s ultimate chance of reproductive success (Cacioppo

2004). In fact, research suggests that almost all the stimuli

we encounter are evaluated on a positive/negative valence

dimension (Bargh 1997; Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum

1957), with these evaluations evoking approach and avoid

behavioral tendencies (Corwin 1921; Lewin 1935). More-

over, in social contexts, specifically, these valence evalua-

tions serve as a central input into person-impression for-

mation (Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick 2007; Kim and Rosenberg

1980).

Considerable evidence now suggests that many of these

social judgments are actually made entirely automatically,

that is, without any conscious deliberation or intent (Bargh

and Chartrand 1999; Devine 1989; Hassin, Uleman, and

Bargh 2005). This automatic “social intelligence” appears

to be supported by specific cognitive and neural mechanisms

(Winston et al. 2002), especially in the area of facial per-

ception (Kanwisher and Yovel 2006). The amygdala region,

in particular, appears to play a central role in making au-

tomatic socially relevant judgments on the basis of facial

appearances (Adolphs, Tranel, and Damasio 1998; Winston

et al. 2002). Indeed, Todorov and Engel (2008) argue that

a primary function of the amygdala may be to provide con-

tinuous vigilance by evaluating objects and agents prior to

interacting with them and that one way this is achieved is

by automatically evaluating the valence of faces (see also

Amaral 2002; Whalen 1998). Once rendered, these valence

evaluations are then used to guide approach/avoidance be-

haviors (Chen and Bargh 1999).

Of particular relevance to the continuing debate as to the

extent to which judgments can truly be determined entirely

automatically, a notable feature of these apparently auto-

matic face-based judgments is that they originate in a part

of the brain that is neuroanatomically dissociable from the

location where explicit judgments based on facial infor-

mation are made (Critchley et al. 2000). Put differently, in

layman’s terms, automatic (and unconscious) processing of

facial information is potentially unique in that it can actually

be attributed to a specific location in the brain. That evo-

lution has chosen to endow us with such specific capabilities

for automatic facial processing only serves to reinforce our

contention that marketers would be wise to pay greater at-

tention to how the implicit processing of facial information

might influence consumer behavior.

From a marketing perspective, a particularly important

insight from this body of research is that individuals appear

CELEBRITY FACIAL CUES 771

to automatically categorize faces in terms of their perceived

trustworthiness (Engell et al. 2007). Indeed, when assessing

unfamiliar faces, trust ratings have been demonstrated to

provide the best approximation of the core underlying va-

lence evaluation (Oosterhof and Todorov 2008). This ca-

pability enables individuals to form judgments about a novel

individual’s trustworthiness after as little as a 50-millisecond

exposure to their face (Todorov, Pakrashi, and Oosterhof

2009; Willis and Todorov 2006). Moreover, the social con-

sequences of these rapid automatic judgments are not re-

stricted to trust ratings in the laboratory. For example, rat-

ings of competence based solely on a 1-second exposure to

accrued to the self-morphed images without any participants

reporting recognition of their own face, suggesting that they

occurred automatically, and that any recognition that did occur

was entirely implicit. Nor is this positive effect of self-morph-

ing limited to simple liking alone. In research that directly

aligns with the neuroscientific work on automatic trust as-

sessment, DeBruine (2002) used a very similar morphing

manipulation to demonstrate that individuals playing a com-

puter-based sequential trust game were more likely to trust a

player represented by a self-morphed avatar.

While these findings demonstrate that individuals have a

clear preference for self-morphed images, major questions re-