Marco Brambilla

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca | UNIMIB · Department of Psychology

The rise of far-right parties with antifeminist sentiments constitutes a new challenge in the path to gender equality. Here, we aim to identify strategies to promote men’s acceptance of social change towards equality. Thus, we first examined key concerns about gender equality held by far-right supporters through a discourse analysis of 120 men. The...

Judgments of trustworthiness based on facial features have mainly been investigated by presenting faces in isolation. However, real-life situations often involve contextual cues. Here, we review our work showing that judgments of trustworthiness from faces are influenced by contextual threat. Individuals are judged as less trustworthy when their fa...

Nostalgia is a social, self-relevant, and bittersweet (although mostly positive) emotion that arises when reflecting on fond past memories and serves key psychological functions. The majority of evidence concerning the prevalence, triggers, and functions of nostalgia has been amassed in samples from a handful of largely Western cultures. If nostalg...

People judge strangers’ trustworthiness based on their facial appearance, but these judgments are biased. Biases towards Black individuals may stem from implicit pro-White attitudes. However, previous studies have not explored if these effects extend to different members within the same social group, like women instead of men, nor considered the ro...

Whistleblowing is the action by which members of an organization report misconduct that occurs within their group to other persons inside or outside the organization. In the present research, we examined perception of whistleblowers in terms of global impressions, emotions, and behavioural intentions. Study 1 reveals negative reactions to whistlebl...

Despite their apparent benevolence, positive stereotypes have been shown to have negative effects in person and group perception. However, little is known about how exposure can exacerbate these negative consequences. In two pre-registered experiments (total N = 240) we investigated the effect of exposure on believability and moral condemnation of...

Research on face perception has established that faces surrounded by threatening contexts are perceived as less trustworthy. Moreover, recent studies revealed that such a face-context integration effect is moderated by the nature of the relational qualifier connecting the face and the context: presenting a face as belonging to either the perpetrato...

Social targets' eyes are a rich source of information: partners with dilated and constricted pupils are perceived positively and negatively, respectively. Here, we tested whether observed pupil size influences the ascription of humanity. In Study 1 (n = 198) participants were asked to attribute positive uniquely human and non-uniquely human traits...

Stereotypes have important social consequences, such as promoting female dis- crimination in the workplace, which depends on how women are categorized. Ex- tending prior work, here we analyze how two important female subgroups, women who are categorized as professional or sexy women, are evaluated on key dimensions of stereotype content (morality,...

Prior research has shown that the face's width‐to‐height ratio (fWHR) and the voice's pitch influence social perception. Yet, the relative contribution of either cue has been largely unexplored. We examined the simultaneous effects of fWHR and pitch on social evaluations. Experiment 1 (N = 102) tested how such cues shaped global impressions. Experi...

Recent work showed that the attribution of facial trustworthiness can be influenced by the surrounding context in which a face is embedded: contexts that convey threat make faces less trustworthy. In four studies (N=388, three pre-registered) we tested whether face-context integration is influenced by how faces and contexts are encoded relationally...

Prior research in the UK and the USA found that heterosexual identity was perceived as more easily compromised than gay identity: a finding dubbed the “Fragile Heterosexuality” effect. However, there is as yet no evidence that this effect occurs outside the USA and UK. With representative samples from Germany ( N = 1236) and Italy ( N = 1249), we i...

It is crucial to understand why people comply with measures to contain viruses and their effects during pandemics. We provide evidence from 35 countries ( N total = 12,553) from 6 continents during the COVID-19 pandemic (between 2021 and 2022) obtained via cross-sectional surveys that the social perception of key protagonists on two basic dimension...

The face is a powerful source to make inferences about one’s trustworthiness. Recent studies demonstrated that facial trustworthiness is influenced by the level of threat conveyed by the visual scene in which faces are embedded: untrustworthy-looking faces are more likely judged as untrustworthy when shown in threatening scenes. Here, we explore wh...

Prior research has shown that the face’s width-to-height ratio (fWHR) and the voice’s pitch influence social perception. Yet, the relative contribution of either cue has been largely unexplored. We examined the simultaneous effects of fWHR and pitch on social evaluations. Experiment 1 (N = 102) tested how such cues shaped global impressions. Experi...

Research has shown that faces and voices shape impression formation. Most studies have examined either the impact of faces and voices in isolation or the relative contribution of each source when presented simultaneously. However, only a few studies have questioned whether and how impressions formed via one source can be updated due to incremental...

The present research explored whether the exposure to the psychological bias of naïve realism (i. e., the conviction that one's own views are objective, and the other's views are biased) could promote stereotype change along the dimensions of morality, sociability, and competence. Due to their double discrimination, we considered Moroccan women liv...

Research has shown that pupil size shapes interpersonal impressions: Individuals with dilated pupils tend to be perceived more positively than those with constricted pupils. Untested so far is the role of cognitive processes in shaping the effects of pupil size. Two pre-registered studies investigated whether the effect of pupil size is qualified b...

A growing body of work has highlighted the importance of political beliefs and attitudes in predicting endorsement and engagement in prosocial behavior. Individuals with right-wing political orientation are less likely to behave prosocially than their left-wing counterparts due to high levels of Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). Here, we aimed to...

Three experiments tested whether verification of ingroup morality increases engagement in collective action in favor of immigrants’ rights. To that end, participants were exposed to (a) verifying, (b) negatively discrepant, (c) enhancing, or (d) no feedback about the morality of their group in general (Studies 1–2) or specifically in matters of cor...

The Moral Primacy Model proposes that throughout the multiple stages of developing impressions of others, information about the target's morality is more influential than information about their competence or socia-bility. Would morality continue to exert outsized influence on impressions in the context of a decision for which people view competenc...

The present work investigates pupillary reactions induced by exposure to faces with different levels of trustworthiness. Participants’ (N = 69) pupillary changes were recorded while they viewed white male faces with a neutral expression varying on facial trustworthiness. Results suggest that reward processing and pupil mimicry are relevant mechanis...

Research on stereotyping has mainly focused on single social categories such as ethnicity or gender. Extending prior work, here we analyse the effects of the intersection of ethnicity and gender on stereotyping considering the descriptive and prescriptive components of positive and negative stereotype dimensions of morality, sociability and compete...

The present research aims at adapting to the Spanish context and language a measure of tolerance toward diversity recently developed, at analyzing its psychometric properties, and at examining the moderating effect of participants’ sex on the relations between tolerance and prejudice. We conducted two studies considering two Spanish samples taken f...

Across two studies, we tested the relationship between the stereotype dimensions of sociability, morality, and competence and the two dimensions of humanness (human nature and human uniqueness). Study 1 considered real groups and revealed that sociability had greater power than morality in predicting human nature. For some groups, sociability also...

Over the past few decades, two-factor models of social cognition have emerged as a dominant framework for understanding impression development. These models suggest that two dimensions-warmth and competence-are key in shaping our cognitive, emotional, and behavioral reactions toward social targets. More recently, research has jettisoned the warmth...

Face processing has mainly been investigated by presenting facial expressions without any contextual information. However, in everyday interactions with others, the sight of a face is often accompanied by contextual cues that are processed either visually or under different sensory modalities. Here, we tested whether the perceived trustworthiness o...

In the last decade, a growing body of research has revealed that morality is the most important driver of impression formation. As such, social targets lacking morality are disliked and kept at distance, while moral targets are liked and respected. Here, we investigated whether social targets lacking morality elicit positive reactions in the observ...

The worldwide spread of a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) since December 2019 has posed a severe threat to individuals' well-being. While the world at large is waiting that the released vaccines immunize most citizens, public health experts suggest that, in the meantime , it is only through behavior change that the spread of COVID-19 can be controlled...

A robust stream of research has shown the detrimental influence of slurs and derogatory epithets on attitudes toward minority groups. Extending prior work, we explored the influence of positive labels ascribed to the majority group on the evaluation of the minority group. Specifically, three studies tested the possibility that the label “straight,”...

Two studies examined whether morality‐related information has a greater impact than sociability‐ or competence‐related information upon the spontaneous mimicry of an interaction partner. Participants were video recorded during an interaction with a confederate previously presented as moral vs. lacking morality, or sociable vs. lacking sociability (...

The secondary transfer effect (STE), defined as contact with a primary outgroup improving attitudes towards a secondary outgroup uninvolved in contact, has mainly been studied with reference to direct contact and considering attitude generalization as the main mediating mechanism. Using a majority (422 Italians) and minority (130 immigrants) adoles...

How immigration is framed in the media can influence ethnic attitudes and support for anti-immigration policies. This work analysed the effects of media representations about immigration (as an invasion or an opportunity for the economic growth of the country) on the perceptions (i.e., perceived [im]morality, realistic and symbolic threat) and emot...

Il presente lavoro analizza il fenomeno del whistleblowing fornendo dapprima una ricognizione delle principali ricerche condotte in ambito organizzativo e proponendo infine una lettura del fenomeno da una prospettiva psicosociale. Nella prima parte sono analizzate le questioni metodologiche relative alla complessità della ricerca sul fenomeno del w...

Morality, which refers to characteristics such as trustworthiness and honesty, has a primary role in social perception and judgment. A negativity effect characterizes the morality dimension, whereby negative information is weighed more than positive information in trait attribution and impression formation. This article reviews the literature on th...

In two studies, we examined how individuals who express schadenfreude – that is joy at an other’s suffering – are perceived by the observers. Study 1 (N = 90) showed that actors expressing schadenfreude elicit a more negative impression and more avoidance intentions than those who display a general negative behavior. Study 2 (N = 90) showed that su...

During social interactions, people look into each other’s eyes to grasp emotional signals. Accordingly, prior research has shown that the eyes reveal social messages that influence interpersonal communication. Here, we tested whether variations in a subtle eye signal – pupil size – influence people’s conforming behavior. Participants performed an e...

Research suggests that morality, sociability, and competence exert different effects on impression formation and that morality forms the primary basis for the global evaluation of others. However, prior work has almost exclusively focused on "first" impressions, overlooking that social interactions require flexible updating of initial evaluations....

The eyes reveal important social messages, such as emotions and whether a person is aroused and interested or bored and fatigued. A growing body of research has also shown that individuals with large pupils are generally evaluated positively by observers, while those with small pupils are perceived negatively. Here, we examined whether observed pup...

Evaluation of facial trustworthiness is often thought to be based on facial features and relatively immune to visual context. However, we rarely encounter an isolated facial expression in the real world. In 3 Experiments using a mouse-tracking paradigm, participants were asked to categorize the trustworthiness of faces that were shown against eithe...

Abundant literature in cognitive sciences has shown that morality is grounded in bodily experience. Four studies tested the perceptual association between the spatial dimension of straightness and the abstract concept of morality. Study 1 (n = 61) employed an IAT and revealed an association between straight figures and moral related words. Study 2...

The present study investigated the influence of sexual stereotyping on the diagnostic impressions and treatment expectations of gay and straight male patients. Italian male straight licensed psychotherapists (N = 152) were presented with clinical vignettes that described a gay (vs. straight) male patient reporting either a straight-stereotypical di...

Trait inference in person perception is based on observers' implicit assumptions about the relations between trait adjectives (e.g., fair) and the either consistent or inconsistent behaviors (e.g., having double standards) that an actor can manifest. This article presents new empirical data and theoretical interpretations on people' behavioral expe...

The present research investigated whether enhanced perceptions of moral purity drive the effects of intergroup cross-group friendships on the intentions to interact with homosexuals. High-school students (N = 639) reported their direct and extended cross-group friendships with homosexuals as well as their beliefs regarding the moral character of th...

The present research tested whether observing the failure of another individual and experiencing schadenfreude (i.e., pleasure at others’ misfortune) enhances the satisfaction of basic psychological needs in terms of self-esteem, control, belongingness, and meaningful existence. Considering hypothetical scenarios (Experiment 1and Experiment 4), rea...

Schadenfreude occurs when people feel pleasure at others’ misfortunes. Previous research suggested that individuals feel such a malicious pleasure when the misfortune befalls social targets perceived as highly competent but lacking human warmth. Two experiments explored whether the two components of warmth (i.e., sociability and morality) have dist...

Emerging evidence revealed that honesty and trustworthiness are important drivers of the impression-formation process. Questions remain, however, regarding the role of these moral attributes in guiding real and concrete behaviors. Filling this gap, the present study investigated the influence of honesty on a nonverbal behavior that regulates social...

Research on pain judgement has shown that several features of a target influence empathy for others' pain. Considering the pivotal role of morality in social judgement, we investigated whether judgements of others' social and physical suffering vary as a function of the target's moral status. Study 1 manipulated the moral characteristics of an unkn...

Four studies tested the proposition that regulation of collective guilt in the face of harmful ingroup behavior involves motivated reasoning. Cognitive energetics theory suggests that motivated reasoning is a function of goal importance, mental resource availability, and task demands. Accordingly, three studies conducted in the United States and Is...

Do people gamble more on slot machines if they think that they are playing against humanlike minds rather than mathematical algorithms? Research has shown that people have a strong cognitive tendency to imbue humanlike mental states to nonhuman entities (i.e., anthropomorphism). The present research tested whether anthropomorphizing slot machines w...

A relatively large literature has demonstrated that sexual orientation can be judged accurately from a variety of minimal cues, including facial appearance. Untested in this work, however, is the influence that individual differences in prejudice against gays and lesbians may exert upon perceivers’ judgments. Here, we report the results of a meta-a...

Agency and communion are the core dimensions of social judgment as they indicate whether someone's intentions toward us are beneficial or harmful (i.e., communion), and whether they have the ability to fulfil their intentions (i.e., agency). Recent advances have demonstrated that communion encompasses both sociability (e.g., friendliness, likeabili...

According to the Spatial Agency Bias (SAB), more agentic groups (men) are envisioned to the left of less agentic groups (women). This research investigated the role of social status in shaping the spatial representation of gender couples. Participants were presented pairs consisting of one male and one female target who confirmed gender stereotypes...

Prior research has demonstrated the impact of morality (vs. competence) information for impression formation. This study examines behavioral implications of people’s initial impressions based on information about their morality vs. competence in a workplace. School teachers and employees (N = 79) were asked to form an impression of a new school man...

Research has shown that intergroup contact is one of the most powerful approaches for improving outgroup attitudes. Further, it has been revealed that contact exerts its effects on prejudice reduction mostly by inducing positive affective processes. The present study (N = 146) investigated whether stereotype content enhancement along the core dimen...

Recent research has shown that information on group morality (rather than competence or sociability) is the primary determinant of group pride, identification, and impression formation. Extending this work, three studies investigated how the morality of ingroup and outgroup targets affects perceived threat and behavioral intentions. In Study 1 (N =...

Recenti studi hanno mostrato un ruolo decisivo e primario che i tratti morali hanno nel pro-muovere una valutazione positiva dei gruppi a cui si appartiene. Partendo da tali risultati, il presente studio ha inteso indagare se la per-cezione di somiglianza sulle norme morali tra gruppo subordinato e gruppo sovraordinato possa promuovere un'identific...

Although individual differences are known to influence numerous aspects of social perception, such as person memory and individuation, little is known about how such variations may affect social categorization. Extending prior research, the present study tested one potential moderator: familiarity with group members. Specifically, straight particip...

La investigación sobre justicia ha demostrado que en ocasiones los individuos prefieren conseguir resultados peores para ellos pero justos, más que resultados beneficiosos pero injustos. La presente investigación explora los efectos de la percepción de justicia sobre las actitudes intergrupales, manipulando la cantidad de recursos asignados a autóc...

Two studies examined the impact of macrolevel symbolic threat on intergroup attitudes. In Study 1 (N = 71), participants exposed to a macrosymbolic threat (vs. nonsymbolic threat and neutral topic) reported less support toward social policies concerning gay men, an outgroup whose stereotypes implies a threat to values, but not toward welfare recipi...

Anthropomorphization is the tendency to ascribe humanlike features and mental states, such as free will and consciousness, to nonhuman beings or inanimate agents. Two studies investigated the consequences of the anthropomorphization of nature on people’s willingness to help victims of natural disasters. Study 1 (N = 96) showed that the humanization...

Research has recently shown that imagining intergroup contact can reduce hostility toward outgroups. The present experiment explored whether imagining intergroup contact leads to more positive perceptions of outgroups differentially stereotyped on the two fundamental dimensions of social perception, namely warmth and competence. Depending on the ex...

Research has shown that warmth and competence are core dimensions on which perceivers judge others and that warmth has a primary role at various phases of impression formation. Three studies explored whether the two components of warmth (i.e., sociability and morality) have distinct roles in predicting the global impression of social groups. In Stu...

Research on the two fundamental dimensions of social judgment, namely warmth and competence, has shown that warmth has a primary and a dominant role in information gathering about others. In two studies we examined whether the sociability and morality components of warmth play distinct roles in such a process. Study 1 (N = 60) investigated which tr...

Research on perceptions of homosexuals implicitly assumes that individuals think about lesbians as an undifferentiated group. By contrast, this paper investigated the stereotypes of the overall category as well as of different subgroups of lesbians within the frame of the stereotype content model (SCM). Participants (N = 70) rated the overall categ...

In considerazione della crescente ostilità verso gli omosessuali rilevata nella società italiana (Eurobarometer, 2008), il presente studio investiga le rappresentazioni stereotipiche della categoria generale e di quattro sottocategorie di maschi gay in rapporto al Modello del Contenuto degli Stereotipi (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick e Xu, 2002). Giovani stud...

Abstract. Considering the attention paid by the European public opinion on international events af-fecting Israel and considering the role played by the media in transmitting information about social groups, the purpose of this research is to investigate the representations of Israel in the Italian press. More specifically, we analyzed the contents...

Research has shown that perceived group status positively predicts competence stereotypes but does not positively predict warmth stereotypes. The present study identified circumstances in which group status positively predicts both warmth and competence judgments. Students (N = 86) rated one of two groups (psychologists vs. engineers) presented as...