Warmth and Competence: Primary Social Dimensions Involved in Face-Based Impressions of Physicians

Abstract

Although they may not necessarily result in accurate judgments, face-based impressions are rapid, automatic, and have been shown to have lasting consequences for social interaction in a variety of situations (Todorov, 2017). This study investigates face-based judgments in the context of the patient-physician relationship, which is central to the medical experience and can significantly impact patient health outcomes. Experiment 1 uses a principal components analysis of ratings on ten social dimensions to determine the primary dimensions involved in evaluating physicians’ faces, as well as the relationships between judgments on each dimension. Experiment 2 uses ratings of digitally generated faces to create a statistical model of perceived physician quality. We show that patients primarily use face-based judgments of competence and warmth during their initial impressions of physicians, as suggested by the stereotype content model (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002), and that these warmth judgments are particularly important in evaluations of perceived physician quality. Furthermore, ratings of warmth and competence are positively correlated for both general impressions and impressions of quality, showing that there is no warmth-competence tradeoff in evaluations of physician faces. These findings provide insight into the factors involved in patients’ impressions of physician faces and how they may contribute to the patient-physician relationship, giving physicians better awareness of how their patients may view them.