Those of you who have seen the movie Cast Away will be familiar with Tom Hanks’ character, Chuck, who becomes marooned on an island for 5 years after a plane crash. Alone and fighting for survival, Chuck finds a Wilson volleyball that he paints a face on and talks to as if it is his friend. A new study finds this type of behavior may be likely in such a situation; a feeling of social disconnection can make inanimate faces appear alive.
Lead researcher of the study Katherine Powers, of Harvard University in Boston, MA, and Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, says that because humans are social beings, a detachment from others causes us to seek social connections.
“As social beings, we have an intrinsic motivation to pay attention to and connect with other people,” says Powers. “We wanted to examine the influence of this social motive on one of the most basic, low-level aspects of social perception: deciding whether or not a face is alive.”
For their study, recently published in the journal Psychological Science, Powers and her team enrolled 30 college students.
First, the students were asked to look at images of male and female faces and report which ones they believed were animate or inanimate.
However, these faces were actually morphs that were created by the team by combining human faces (animate) with doll’s faces (inanimate). The faces ranged from 0-100% human, and the students were shown the faces in a random order.
After completing this experiment, the students were asked to complete a survey from which the researchers could get an idea of their craving for social interaction. They were asked to agree or disagree with a set of statements, such as “I want other people to accept me.”
The researchers found that the students who had higher scores on social connections did not need to see as many human features in a face to determine that it was animate, compared with those who had lower scores on social connections.
This indicates that those who were socially disconnected were more likely to deem faces that were inanimate as being alive.
In another experiment involving a separate group of college students, Powers and her team wanted to see how concerns about future loneliness would influence an individual’s perception of animacy.
Students were asked to complete a questionnaire about their personality and were told they would be given feedback based on their answers. The team then randomly gave feedback to each student, telling some they were likely to be isolated and lonely in the future, while telling others they would have long-lasting, stable relationships in their lives.
The students were then asked to look at the morph images created for the first experiment.
The researchers found that the students who had been told they would be isolated and lonely in the future were more likely to see animacy among inanimate faces than those who were told they would have long-lasting, stable relationships.
Powers says these findings challenge past studies suggesting that individuals are cautious when it comes to deciding whether a face is alive:
“What’s really interesting here is the degree of variability in this perception. Even though two people may be looking at the same face, the point at which they see life and decide that person is worthy of meaningful social interaction may not be the same – our findings show that it depends on an individual’s social relationship status and motivations for future social interactions.
I think the fact that we can observe such a bias in the perception of basic social cues really underscores the fundamental nature of the human need for social connection.”
Medical News Today recently reported on a study by researchers at the University of York in the UK, which found that a person’s facial features influence first impressions.