Evaluating the Independence of Age, Sex, and Race in Judgment of Faces

Three experiments have been conducted in the current work. All experiments applied the Garner methodology to the facial dimensions of age, sex, and race. The main goal was to provide an exhaustive assessment of their dimensional relations. The degree of separability was evaluated in a pairwise fashion. Each experiment was designed to test one pair. In Experiment 1a and 1b, sex and race were entered into the Garner test. The dimensional separability of these social categories was investigated with an eye on the potential influence of a social bias on the level of separability (Johnson et al., 2012). It was assumed that the presence of a social bias (Experiment 1b) should increase the likelihood of integrality among these dimensions. Experiment 2 was set to assess the separabilty of sex and race. And Experiment 3 was aimed at evaluating the separability of age and sex. In combination, the three experiments covered all the possible pairing of these dimensions.