Investigating The Effect of Face Masks on Subjective Social Judgements from Faces

COVID-19 brought along with it various changes to our daily lives. One such change is the practice of wearing a mask in order to protect from the virus. This has affected the way individuals communicate as masks partially cover one’s facial expression making it difficult for the listener to understand and interpret what is being said (Mheidly et al., 2020). Humans rely on holistic processing of faces for social interaction. This paper focuses on examining how masks affect how individuals make subjective social judgements from faces. The hypotheses of this study are: there is a significant difference in the latency of responses in the masked vs. non- masked conditions and that there are significantly lower confidence ratings for social judgments in the masked condition than the non-masked condition. To test these hypotheses, 30 participants were presented with facial stimuli with or without a mask and were asked questions about traits such as attractiveness, trustworthiness and honesty. In addition to this, they were asked to rate their confidence in the judgements made as well. The reaction time of the participants’ responses and their confidence ratings were analysed using a t test, and the results were found to be statistically significant. Thus, in the masked condition, participants had greater reaction times and lower confidence ratings indicating interference in facial processing.