The Psych Files

Category: Research Methods and Statistics

  • You’ve Got Dopamine Backwards (and I Can Prove It On Piano)

    You’ve Got Dopamine Backwards (and I Can Prove It On Piano)

    Picture yourself on the couch, phone in hand, scrolling through a food delivery app. You linger over the dumplings. You consider the spring rolls. You add the spring rolls. You place the order, and for the next forty minutes something in you is quietly humming. Then the bag arrives, the food is a little lukewarm, you eat it in front of the television, and twenty minutes later you can barely remember it. If you have ever noticed that the ordering was more fun than the eating, you are not alone, and somebody has built a website about it.


    A trend that started as a joke


    In September 2026 the New York Times reported on a wave of what are being called dopamine sites, and the story is stranger than the name suggests. It began in March, when a mechanical engineering student in Seoul named Seohyun Park built a site that looks like a food delivery app. You browse, you choose, you order, and nothing comes. The name translates roughly as Food Never Arrives. When you’re done, it totals up the money you didn’t spend and the calories you didn’t eat. Park says she built it as a joke, after noticing that she got more pleasure from placing orders than from eating what showed up. About ten thousand people a month visit it.


    Others followed. Two developers in India built a fake delivery service that hands you real recipes instead of food; it has drawn over two and a half million views. And a developer in South Korea who doesn’t smoke, but who used to tag along on her coworkers’ cigarette breaks, built a site with a large cigarette in the middle of the screen. Tap it and a timed smoke break begins, complete with drifting smoke and a crackling sound, while other visitors’ messages float past. About 150,000 people a month take a break there.


    The easy explanation is in the name: these sites deliver dopamine without the cost. But the popular story about dopamine is wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that makes these sites more interesting, not less.


    Dopamine is not the reward


    Most people carry around a simple model: you eat the chocolate or win the money, your brain releases dopamine, and that release is the pleasure. Reward first, dopamine second. Two lines of research say otherwise.


    The first comes from Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan, and Read Montague, who in 1997 recorded from individual dopamine neurons in monkeys learning a simple task. At the start, a squirt of juice made the neurons fire. So far, the popular story holds. But once the monkeys learned that a light reliably came on before the juice, the neurons stopped firing at the juice and started firing at the light. Dopamine tracked the prediction, not the payoff. And when the light came on and no juice followed, the neurons dipped below their resting level. This pattern, called a reward prediction error, is one of the most replicated findings in neuroscience.


    The second comes from Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson at the University of Michigan. Rats, like human babies, make a distinctive face when something sweet touches their tongue, so you can read whether they like a taste directly off their expression. Berridge’s team took rats with almost no dopamine left in the reward system and gave them sugar. The rats made all the same happy faces. What they wouldn’t do was work for it, press a lever for it, or walk across the cage for it. Their liking was intact. Their wanting was gone. Dopamine, on this account, is the chemistry of wanting and anticipation, not of enjoyment.


    Put those together and the people who named these sites got it right for the wrong reason. They think they’re delivering pleasure without the product. What they’re actually delivering is anticipation without the product.


    What a piano chord can teach you


    Musicians have been running this experiment on audiences for centuries. Most Western music sets up a chord that points toward home, then takes you home: tension, then release. A deceptive cadence (an interrupted cadence, in British usage) plays the setup and then steps sideways, so the tension builds instead of resolving. Stack two or three of those in a row before the final chord lands and the landing feels better than it would have if you had gone straight there. The closing seconds of Whitney Houston’s 1991 Super Bowl performance of the national anthem are a famous example: one held note, the orchestra moving underneath it, a stadium waiting for a chord it knows is coming.


    In 2011 Valorie Salimpoor, Robert Zatorre, and colleagues at McGill scanned people listening to music they had chosen because it reliably gave them chills. They found dopamine release at two different moments in two different brain regions. At the peak, the moment of the chills, dopamine was released in the nucleus accumbens. In the seconds before the peak, while the music built toward it, dopamine was released in the caudate. The anticipation had its own signal, and it came first.

    Anticipation has a price tag


    Economists figured this out a long time ago. In 1987 George Loewenstein asked people how much they would pay for a kiss from the movie star of their choice, delivered immediately, in three hours, in a day, in three days, or in a year. Standard economics says sooner is better. People said otherwise: they would pay more for the kiss in three days than for the kiss right now, because three days of looking forward to it was worth something, and a year of waiting was not. That is the deceptive cadence again. Park’s observation about her takeout is the same finding without the economics journal.


    Can a fake meal make you eat less?


    The real hope behind these sites is not just that fake ordering feels good, but that it takes the edge off real ordering. Is there any evidence for that? Sort of. In 2010 Carey Morewedge, Young Eun Huh, and Joachim Vosgerau had people imagine eating M&Ms one at a time. Some imagined eating thirty; others imagined eating three and then imagined feeding coins into a laundry machine twenty-seven times, so that the amount of repetitive imagining was matched. Afterward, everyone was handed a bowl of real M&Ms. The thirty-M&M group ate significantly fewer. The explanation is habituation: your response to a stimulus fades with repetition, and you can apparently wear it out in your imagination without the candy ever touching your tongue.


    Or make you crave more?


    The Times quotes Lingguo Xu, a behavioral economist at the University of Waterloo, worrying that simulated consumption might strengthen cravings rather than satisfy them. That worry has research behind it. Brian Carter and Stephen Tiffany’s 1999 meta-analysis of cue reactivity studies found that showing smokers a cigarette, or playing them the sound of a lighter, reliably raises craving and heart rate. A large cigarette on a screen with drifting smoke and a crackling sound is a cue reactivity stimulus by any definition, and a delivery menu with a photograph of every dish is not far behind.


    And recall the prediction error work. When the light came on and no juice followed, dopamine dipped. A site literally named Food Never Arrives runs the full cue sequence and then withholds the reward. In music, no composer does that; the deceptive cadence works because home is coming. Take home away for good and you don’t have anticipation. You have frustration.


    How do you square this with the M&M study? Morewedge’s participants imagined eating thirty times in a row. That repetition produced the habituation. Most people probably browse a fake menu once, place one order, and laugh. That isn’t thirty repetitions of eating; it’s one very good cue. So these sites may work if used one way and backfire if used another, and nobody has measured which way people actually use them. Every claim in the Times piece about the sites helping anyone is self-report from the people who built them.


    The fake smoke break that made real friends


    One more thing, because it doesn’t fit the dopamine story at all. The creator of the smoke-break site told the Times that visitors began talking to one another about work, school, and whatever was going wrong in their lives, and that some became real friends who now meet in person. (Some of them, she noted, step outside and light up together.) What the site gave people was an excuse to stand next to a stranger for a few minutes and say something. That may be the best thing in the whole article, and it has nothing to do with anticipation.


    What to take away


    Here is what the research agrees on. Dopamine fires at the cue, not at the reward. Anticipation is a pleasure of its own, one people will pay for and musicians have used for centuries. And you can wear anticipation out in your imagination if you repeat it enough. What nobody has tested is which of those things a dopamine site actually does: thirty imaginary meals, or one very good menu. That is not a case of researchers who can’t make up their minds. It’s a specific, answerable question that nobody has gotten around to answering.


    The one thing worth carrying out the door is the correction. Dopamine is not the reward. It is the wanting, the looking forward, the light that comes on before the juice.


    Psychology Terms in This Article


    Reward prediction error. The difference between the reward you expected and the reward you got, signaled by dopamine neurons that fire more when outcomes beat expectations and dip when they fall short. Schultz and colleagues found that once monkeys learned a light predicted juice, dopamine fired at the light and dropped when the juice failed to arrive.


    Wanting versus liking. Berridge and Robinson’s distinction between the motivation to pursue a reward (wanting, tied to dopamine) and the pleasure of consuming it (liking, tied to other systems). Dopamine-depleted rats still enjoyed sugar but would not seek it out.


    Anticipatory utility. The satisfaction gained from expecting a future event, as distinct from experiencing or remembering it. Loewenstein’s participants would pay more for a movie-star kiss in three days than for one right now.


    Habituation. A decrease in response to a stimulus after repeated exposure. Morewedge and colleagues showed that repeatedly imagining eating a food reduced how much of it people later ate.


    Deceptive cadence. In music, a progression in which the chord that points toward the home chord resolves somewhere unexpected instead, delaying the release of tension. Also called an interrupted cadence.

    References

  • Science Corrects Itself: The Embodied Cognition Story 

    Science Corrects Itself: The Embodied Cognition Story 

    Try giving someone directions while sitting on your hands. It is harder than it should be. Your hands start drawing the map, pointing at the turns, shaping the roundabout — even on the phone, where nobody can see a thing. The body gets involved in work that supposedly belongs to the brain, and for the past twenty-five years psychology has had a name for the idea that this is no accident: embodied cognition. On the podcast this week I walk through the whole arc of this idea — the exciting findings, the collapse of many of them, and the genuinely hopeful way the field responded. This post covers the highlights, with sources at the bottom for students and instructors.

    What Embodied Cognition Claims

    The picture of the mind most of us inherited treats the brain as a computer: input, processing, output, with the body serving as the peripherals. Embodied cognition pushes back. It says thinking is built out of the body’s experiences — that concepts are grounded in sensing and moving. The linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson laid the intellectual groundwork in their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, pointing out how much abstract thought leans on physical metaphor. A warm person. A dirty trick. You grasp an idea, weigh your options, carry a heavy secret. Their claim was that these are not decorations on top of thought. They are the structure of thought, learned through the body.

    The Findings That Made Everyone Believers

    The strongest evidence came from neuroscience. In 2004, Olaf Hauk, Ingrid Johnsrude, and Friedemann Pulvermüller put people in an fMRI scanner and had them passively read action words — lick, pick, kick. Your motor cortex is organized like a map of the body, and reading each word activated motor areas overlapping or adjacent to the regions that control the tongue, the fingers, and the feet. Nobody moved. The meaning of the word reached the body’s control panel anyway. This finding, published in Neuron, has been repeated and extended many times, and it still stands.

    Behavioral evidence followed. Arthur Glenberg and Michael Kaschak (2002) reported the action-sentence compatibility effect: people judging sentences like “Art handed you the pen” responded faster when their hand movement matched the direction of the action in the sentence, suggesting that understanding language involves quietly simulating it with the motor system.

    Then the idea got glamorous. John Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows (1996) reported that students who unscrambled sentences containing elderly-stereotype words — Florida, bingo, gray — walked more slowly down the hallway afterward, timed by an experimenter with a stopwatch. (Strictly speaking this is social priming, with the arrow running from concept to body rather than body to concept, but the two literatures grew up together and, as you will see, fell together.) Williams and Bargh (2008) found that briefly holding a hot coffee led people to rate a stranger’s personality as warmer. Zhong and Liljenquist (2006) reported the “Macbeth effect”: copying a story about an unethical act made cleansing products seem more desirable. Strack, Martin, and Stepper (1988) found that holding a pen in the teeth — which forces a smile — made cartoons seem funnier. And Carney, Cuddy, and Yap (2010) reported that two minutes of expansive “power posing” raised testosterone, lowered cortisol, and increased risk taking in a sample of 42 people. Amy Cuddy’s 2012 TED talk on that finding became one of the most watched ever.

    I Believed It Too

    Full disclosure: in my book Psych Experiments, I suggested that readers could try the hot coffee study for themselves. It was published in Science. Textbooks taught it. I taught it. This next section is therefore a little personal.

    Then the Replications Came

    Stéphane Doyen and colleagues (2012) redid the elderly walking study with infrared sensors instead of a stopwatch and a larger sample: no effect. Their second experiment is the one every student should know. They manipulated what the experimenters expected — and a walking effect appeared only when the experimenters believed participants would walk slowly. The effect appeared to live in the experimenters, a modern Clever Hans story and a clear demonstration of why double-blind procedures exist.

    Dermot Lynott and colleagues (2014) ran three high-powered direct replications of the warm-pack version of the coffee study — 861 participants in total. No effect in any lab. Brian Earp and colleagues (2014) obtained the original Macbeth effect materials, ran samples about five times larger than the original across multiple countries, and found nothing. A seventeen-lab registered replication led by E.-J. Wagenmakers (2016) tested the pen-in-the-teeth study: the original difference of 0.82 points shrank to 0.03 — a flat line. Eva Ranehill and colleagues (2015) replicated power posing with roughly five times the participants: people felt more powerful, but the hormone and behavior effects vanished, and a p-curve analysis by Simmons and Simonsohn (2017) suggested the supporting literature looked like noise. In 2016, Dana Carney — first author of the original power posing paper — publicly stated that she no longer believed the effect was real.

    And in 2022 came the one that stings: an eighteen-lab, pre-registered replication of the action-sentence compatibility effect, the flagship behavioral finding of the whole field. Not one lab found it, and the pooled estimate of the effect was essentially zero. Look at the author list of that paper: Kaschak and Glenberg — the original discoverers — helped run it and signed it.

    Why Did the Original Studies Find Effects?

    Not fraud, for the most part. Something more ordinary and more instructive. Tiny samples (30 to 42 people) produce results that swing widely from sample to sample, and some of those swings are large by pure sampling luck. Publication bias means journals printed the lucky swings while null results went in the file drawer. Researcher degrees of freedom — which measure to report, which participants to exclude, when to stop collecting data — offered many innocent-looking forks in the road, and enough forks will usually lead to a publishable result. And experimenter expectancy effects, as Doyen demonstrated directly, can manufacture a finding when the people running the study know the hypothesis and interact with participants.

    The Rebuild: Adversarial Collaboration

    Failed replications sparked arguments, and some objections from original authors were reasonable — Strack noted, for example, that the replication labs used visible video cameras, which may make participants self-conscious. The field’s answer to this stalemate is the best part of the story. In 2022, the Many Smiles Collaboration published, in Nature Human Behaviour, a pre-registered test of the facial feedback hypothesis designed jointly by proponents and critics — Strack himself was on the team — with 3,878 participants in 19 countries. The verdict landed in the middle: deliberately posing or mimicking a smile does nudge felt happiness, a real but modest effect, while the pen-in-the-mouth method came back inconclusive. That matches a 2019 meta-analysis by Coles and colleagues: facial feedback is real, and it is small.

    What’s Left Standing

    Here is where things honestly stand: the neuroscience core of embodied cognition is in decent shape — sensory and motor systems really do participate when we process meaning. The flashy social-priming findings have collapsed: coffee cups, cleansing products, and hormone-shifting poses did not survive rigorous testing, and the flagship behavioral effect could not be found by the very people who discovered it. The open question is whether the body’s involvement is necessary for understanding or is more of an echo. Meanwhile the field rebuilt its methods — pre-registration, multi-lab studies, samples in the thousands — and the original researchers helped run the studies that overturned their own findings. People call this the replication crisis. I’d call it science doing exactly what it is supposed to do. And the next edition of Psych Experiments will treat the hot coffee study accordingly: run it, and expect to find nothing — because finding nothing, when the original claim was world famous, is a real result.

    Psychology Terms in This Article

    Embodied cognition — The theory that thinking is grounded in the body’s sensory and motor systems rather than consisting only of abstract symbol processing. In this episode, it is the framework behind everything from the kick-lick-pick fMRI study to power posing.

    Replication — Repeating a study to see whether its results hold up; a direct replication reproduces the original methods as closely as possible. The seventeen-lab test of the pen-in-the-teeth study and the eighteen-lab test of the action-sentence compatibility effect are direct replications.

    Statistical power — A study’s ability to detect an effect if the effect is real, which depends heavily on sample size. The original power posing study had 42 participants; its replication had roughly five times as many, which is why its null result carries weight.

    Publication bias — The tendency for studies that find effects to get published while null results stay in the file drawer, so the published record shows only the successes. This is one reason so many small early studies pointed the same direction.

    Demand characteristics — Cues in a study that hint to participants what the researcher expects, nudging their behavior. Visible video cameras in the smile replications were debated as a possible source.

    Experimenter expectancy effect — The experimenter’s own beliefs leaking into how a study is run and measured, as when a walking-speed effect appeared only for experimenters who expected it. Clever Hans, the “counting” horse, is the classic historical example.

    Pre-registration — Publicly recording a study’s hypotheses, methods, and analysis plan before collecting data, which closes off after-the-fact flexibility. Every major replication discussed in this episode was pre-registered.

    Adversarial collaboration — A study designed and run jointly by researchers who disagree, with the rules agreed in advance. The Many Smiles Collaboration, which included the original smile-study author alongside his critics, is the model case.

    References

    Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 230–244. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.71.2.230

    Carney, D. R., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Yap, A. J. (2010). Power posing: Brief nonverbal displays affect neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance. Psychological Science, 21(10), 1363–1368. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610383437

    Coles, N. A., Larsen, J. T., & Lench, H. C. (2019). A meta-analysis of the facial feedback literature: Effects of facial feedback on emotional experience are small and variable. Psychological Bulletin, 145(6), 610–651. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000194

    Coles, N. A., March, D. S., Marmolejo-Ramos, F., et al. (2022). A multi-lab test of the facial feedback hypothesis by the Many Smiles Collaboration. Nature Human Behaviour, 6(12), 1731–1742. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01458-9

    Doyen, S., Klein, O., Pichon, C.-L., & Cleeremans, A. (2012). Behavioral priming: It’s all in the mind, but whose mind? PLoS ONE, 7(1), e29081. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0029081

    Earp, B. D., Everett, J. A. C., Madva, E. N., & Hamlin, J. K. (2014). Out, damned spot: Can the “Macbeth Effect” be replicated? Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 36(1), 91–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2013.856792

    Glenberg, A. M., & Kaschak, M. P. (2002). Grounding language in action. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(3), 558–565. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196313

    Hauk, O., Johnsrude, I., & Pulvermüller, F. (2004). Somatotopic representation of action words in human motor and premotor cortex. Neuron, 41(2), 301–307. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0896-6273(03)00838-9

    Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.

    Lynott, D., Corker, K. S., Wortman, J., Connell, L., Donnellan, M. B., Lucas, R. E., & O’Brien, K. (2014). Replication of “Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth” by Williams and Bargh (2008). Social Psychology, 45(3), 216–222. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000187

    Morey, R. D., Kaschak, M. P., Díez-Álamo, A. M., Glenberg, A. M., Zwaan, R. A., Lakens, D., et al. (2022). A pre-registered, multi-lab non-replication of the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 29, 613–626. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-021-01927-8

    Ranehill, E., Dreber, A., Johannesson, M., Leiberg, S., Sul, S., & Weber, R. A. (2015). Assessing the robustness of power posing: No effect on hormones and risk tolerance in a large sample of men and women. Psychological Science, 26(5), 653–656. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614553946

    Simmons, J. P., & Simonsohn, U. (2017). Power posing: P-curving the evidence. Psychological Science, 28(5), 687–693. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616658563

    Strack, F., Martin, L. L., & Stepper, S. (1988). Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: A nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 768–777. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.5.768

    Wagenmakers, E.-J., Beek, T., Dijkhoff, L., Gronau, Q. F., et al. (2016). Registered Replication Report: Strack, Martin, & Stepper (1988). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(6), 917–928. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616674458

    Williams, L. E., & Bargh, J. A. (2008). Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth. Science, 322(5901), 606–607. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1162548

    Zhong, C.-B., & Liljenquist, K. (2006). Washing away your sins: Threatened morality and physical cleansing. Science, 313(5792), 1451–1452. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1130726

  • Why the Whites of Your Eyes Shape a Stranger’s First Impression

    Why the Whites of Your Eyes Shape a Stranger’s First Impression

    You meet someone for the first time, and within a second or two you’ve already decided something about them — whether you’d trust them, whether you’d want to keep talking. You didn’t run through a checklist. It just happened. And it turns out one of the things your brain quietly picks up on is something you’ve probably never once thought about on purpose: how much of the white of a person’s eyes you can see.

    A study published in PLOS One by Mathias Boyer-Brosseau, Simon Rigoulot, and Sébastien Hétu looked at exactly that — the sclera, the white outer layer of the eyeball — and how the amount of it we can see shapes our first impressions. I came across this one on PsyPost, in a write-up by Eric W. Dolan, and it’s a great example of how a feature you’d never mention out loud can be doing real work behind the scenes.

    Here’s what they did. They took photos of faces with neutral expressions from a well-known set called the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database. Then they digitally created two versions of each face — one showing a smaller amount of visible white (about 31.5% of the visible eye) and one showing more (about 43.8%) — while keeping everything else about the face identical. Then 162 adults rated the faces on four things: how much they’d trust the person, whether they’d interact with them, how attractive they found them, and where they’d place them in the social pecking order.

    The result was remarkably consistent. Faces showing more of the white of the eye were rated as more trustworthy, more attractive, more sociable, and higher in social rank. And this wasn’t a quirk of one group — it held for male and female faces, and for male and female raters alike. A cue you never consciously register nudged four separate judgments in the same direction.

    So why would the amount of white matter at all? Part of the answer is that these judgments are fast and effortless — a textbook case of automatic processing, the mental work that happens without conscious awareness or intent. You’re not deciding to evaluate someone’s sclera; your brain does it for you and hands you a feeling. The researchers offer two evolutionary psychology explanations — the idea that some mental traits stuck around because they helped our ancestors solve social problems. Humans are unusual in having such visible whites, which makes it easy to follow exactly where someone is looking, and reading gaze is a huge part of getting along with other people. On top of that, scleral exposure tends to peak in our early twenties and shrink as we age, so more white may quietly read as youth, health, and vitality.

    There’s another layer here worth naming. A surface feature swaying a bunch of deeper judgments is basically peripheral route persuasion — attitude change that runs on superficial cues like attractiveness rather than on any real evidence about the person. And the ratings all moved together: faces judged attractive were also judged trustworthy, the classic attractiveness halo effect, where one good impression bleeds into all the others.

    I have to admit, as a former college professor this one landed a little uncomfortably. I formed quick reads on students and colleagues all the time, and I’m sure I told myself those reads were based on something substantial. Studies like this are a good reminder that a chunk of my “gut” was probably running on cues about this superficial.

    One honest caveat, and it’s a good one for anyone studying research methods: to add more visible white, the team had to make the eye itself a little bigger, so they couldn’t fully separate “more white” from “bigger eyes.” That’s a confounding variable — a second factor riding along with the one you care about, muddying the cause. The faces and raters were also mostly White, so we don’t yet know how far this travels across cultures.

    What do you actually do with this? You can’t change your sclera, and please don’t try. The useful move runs the other direction: knowing your snap judgments can hinge on something this trivial should make you hold them more loosely. Next time you get an instant read on a stranger, treat it as a first guess, not a verdict — and give the person a second data point before you trust it.

    If you’re taking a psychology course, scroll down — I’ve pulled out the key concepts this research illustrates, so you can see how a real study maps onto the terms you’re studying.

    Psychology Terms in This Article

    Automatic processing — Cognitive processing that happens without conscious awareness, intention, or effort, like recognizing a familiar face. In this study, participants weren’t deliberately measuring anyone’s sclera; the judgments of trust, attractiveness, sociability, and rank formed instantly and effortlessly, which is exactly why a cue this subtle could move them.

    Evolutionary psychology — An approach that treats psychological traits as adaptations that evolved to solve recurring problems for our ancestors. The researchers use it to explain why we’d care about the white of the eye at all: highly visible sclera makes gaze-following easier (crucial for cooperation), and more white may signal youth and health — both things it would have paid off to notice.

    Peripheral route persuasion — Attitude change driven by superficial cues, such as attractiveness or surface features, rather than by the quality of any real information. The whole effect here is peripheral-route in miniature: a small change to one facial feature shifted people’s overall impression of a stranger without adding a single fact about who that person actually is.

    Confounding variable — An extra factor that varies along with the variable you’re studying, offering an alternative explanation for the result. Because increasing the visible white also slightly enlarged the eye, eye size is a confound here — the researchers can’t be fully certain whether it was the extra white or the bigger eye driving the friendlier ratings.

    References

    Boyer-Brosseau, M., Rigoulot, S., & Hétu, S. (2026). Scleral exposure influences social judgments of trustworthiness, attractiveness, sociability, and social rank in White faces. PLOS One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0348193

    Dolan, E. W. (2026, July 28). People judge faces with more visible eye whites as more trustworthy and attractive. PsyPost.