Why guys look tough and girls tender
By IANSWednesday, January 12, 2011
WASHINGTON - There might be some truth in the popular perception that guys are tough and girls tender.
People are more likely to judge a gender-neutral face as masculine if it conveys a hard impression and as feminine if it is soft, the journal Psychological Science reported.
Michael Slepian, a graduate student at Tufts University in the US, and his colleagues wanted to know if this was true for how people think about gender, according to a Tufts statement.
For experiment, people were given either a hard or a soft ball to hold, then they were told to squeeze it continuously while looking at pictures of faces on a computer.
Each face had been made to look exactly gender-neutral, so it was neither male nor female. For each face, the volunteer had to categorize it as a male or a female.
People who were squeezing the soft ball were more likely to judge faces as female, while people who handled the hard ball were more likely to categorize them as male.
“We were really surprised,” said Slepian, who co-wrote the study with Max Weisbuch of the University of Denver, Nicholas O. Rule at the University of Toronto, and Nalini Ambady of Tufts University.
“It’s remarkable that the feeling of handling something hard or soft can influence how you visually perceive a face,” he concluded.
