Chujun Lin, PhD
Postdoctoral Scholar in Psychology, Caltech
Welcome
I am currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Emotion and Social Cognition Lab (The Adolphs Lab) at Caltech (California Institute of Technology, CA, USA). I received my Ph.D. in social science from Caltech in June 2019, and B.A. in finance from Zhejiang University, China in June 2014.
In my Ph.D. work, I studied how people form impressions about other people based on faces, what those impressions say about social stereotypes, and how they impact social behavior in everyday life. I use a combination of behavioral (online experiment, eye-tracking, etc.) and machine learning methods in my research.
Besides face perception, I am also interested in how people understand the mental states and behaviors of other people, as well as how psychological and behavioral interventions could help mitigate biases in social perception and promote positive social outcomes. I am excited to learn more about these questions during my postdoctoral training.
Research
How do people attribute traits to other people based on faces?
How do people form impressions of others based on faces? Existing psychological theories argue that people attribute traits to others from faces along two or three dimensions. While these theories have now been incorporated into numerous empirical and theoretical studies, they were derived from a small set of trait attributions, which limits their generalizability and leaves the true nature of the psychological dimensions unclear. The present study applied deep neural networks to representatively sample an inclusive list of traits and faces, generating a comprehensive set of 100 traits and 100 faces that we administered in two large-scale preregistered studies. These comprehensive trait attributions (Study 1, 750,000 ratings) revealed a novel four-dimensional space: warmth, competence, female-stereotype, and youth-stereotype, challenging existing theories. Study 2 collecting dense individual-level data in seven different countries (2,100,000 trials) reproduced this four-dimensional space across cultures and in individual participants. These findings, together with test-retest reliability of all trait attributions and direct comparisons with existing theories, provide a new, most comprehensive characterization of trait attributions from faces.
with Umit Keles and Ralph Adolphs
Can people infer corruptible politicians based on their faces?
While inferences of traits from unfamiliar faces prominently reveal stereotypes, some facial inferences also correlate with real-world outcomes. We investigated whether facial inferences are associated with an important real-world outcome closely linked to the face bearer’s behavior: political corruption. In four preregistered studies (N = 325), participants made trait judgments of unfamiliar government officials on the basis of their photos. Relative to peers with clean records, federal and state officials convicted of political corruption (Study 1) and local officials who violated campaign finance laws (Study 2) were perceived as more corruptible, dishonest, selfish, and aggressive but similarly competent, ambitious, and masculine (Study 3). Mediation analyses and experiments in which the photos were digitally manipulated showed that participants’ judgments of how corruptible an official looked were causally influenced by the face width of the stimuli (Study 4). The findings shed new light on the complex causal mechanisms linking facial appearances with social behavior.
with Ralph Adolphs and R. Michael Alvarez
