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Dr. Barney Graham to give Higuchi Memorial Lectures on March 31
LAWRENCE — Dr. Barney Graham, recently retired deputy director of the National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center, will be featured March 31 at the 17th Higuchi Memorial Lectures, including a public event from 5 to 6 p.m. at 1154 Gray-Little Hall. Graham will present “How COVID-19 Vaccine Development Shapes the Future of Pandemic Preparedness.” A livestream of the public lecture will be available online at https://rockcha.lk/higuchi.
Facial characteristics of female candidates hinder electability by conservative voters, but not liberals
LAWRENCE — New research from a University of Kansas professor finds that a person’s political orientation can bias their judgment of a candidate’s electability based on facial characteristics and stereotypes associated with gender. Ahreum Maeng’s article, titled “The Face of Political Beliefs: Why Gender Matters for Electability,” reveals how Americans with conservative or liberal views read dominance signals differently when exposed to facial cues from men or women.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Brad Stauffer, School of Pharmacy, [email protected], @KUPharmacy
Dr. Barney Graham to give Higuchi Memorial Lectures on March 31
LAWRENCE — Dr. Barney Graham, recently retired deputy director of the National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center, will be featured March 31 at the 17th Higuchi Memorial Lectures. A scientific lecture for students and faculty will be held from 12:30-1:30 p.m. at the School of Pharmacy on the Lawrence campus West District. A public lecture will be held from 5-6 p.m. at 1154 Gray-Little Hall on the Lawrence campus Central District. A livestream of the public lecture will be available online at https://rockcha.lk/higuchi.
Graham, who earned his medical degree from the KU School of Medicine in 1979, has been widely recognized for his role in the rapid development of novel vaccines to combat coronaviruses, including the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines used for COVID-19. Graham and another NIH colleague shared the Federal Employee of the Year award in 2021 for their research that led to the coronavirus vaccines. The Kansas native is an immunologist, virologist and clinical trials physician with an extensive background in basic and translational research applied to vaccine development. His work has focused on respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza, coronaviruses, HIV and other emerging viral diseases.
The scientific lecture is titled “Rapid COVID-19 Vaccine Development and the Future of Vaccinology,” while Graham’s public lecture is titled “How COVID-19 Vaccine Development Shapes the Future of Pandemic Preparedness.”
Hosted by the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry in the KU School of Pharmacy, the biennial lectures honor Takeru Higuchi, who founded the department and is considered the “father of physical pharmacy.” Higuchi, who died in 1987 at the pinnacle of his career, was a prolific drug developer and entrepreneur, creating numerous entities to further pharmaceutical advancements.
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Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
Facial characteristics of female candidates hinder electability by conservative voters, but not liberals
LAWRENCE — A conservative-majority America may never elect a female president.
At least that is one takeaway from new research arguing a perceiver’s political orientation biases their judgment of a candidate’s electability based on facial characteristics and stereotypes associated with gender.
“Facial information forms that first impression within less than a second. Other information may override it. But it may not,” said Ahreum Maeng, associate professor of marketing at the University of Kansas.
Her new article titled “The Face of Political Beliefs: Why Gender Matters for Electability” reveals how American conservatives and liberals read dominance signals differently when exposed to facial cues from men or women.
Conservatives show stronger bias against female faces because they are less likely to elect female candidates due to their association with lower dominance, according to the study, which will appear in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.
Co-written by Pankaj Aggarwal of the University of Toronto, the research centers on the width-to-height-ratio (fWHR) of a person’s face. Higher ratios are known for signaling a dominant personality and stronger leadership traits. Using controlled experiments and an archival study, they found that although fWHR is positively correlated with dominance evaluations of male faces, the same attribution is less likely to be made for female faces based on one’s political affiliation.
“This study shows that metric automatically triggers dominance perception in the person. So then it really doesn’t matter whether that person is behaving dominantly or behaving trustworthy. It just makes the perceivers see that person as more dominant and aggressive, and then therefore cannot be trustworthy,” Maeng said.
Previous research cited in the article suggests that conservatives hold stronger female stereotypes than liberals, and political conservatism is positively associated with hostile sexism. But why do conservatives show stauncher bias than liberals against female faces specifically?
“I don’t know whether it’s a bias or not,” Maeng said. “Both liberals and conservatives have an expectation of females being more communal compared to the male. I think that’s common. But conservatives have a stronger expectation from the female on that trait. So when they see that dominance signal from the wider female faces, it backfires, and they suppress more. Therefore, they see wider as less dominant,” she said.
“For liberals, assertiveness and dominance may not even be a factor that they consider for leadership. I don’t know what they look for, but at least I can say that trait is not what they looking for,” she said.
Maeng emphasized her findings have implications not simply for elected officials but for female leadership in general.
She said, “Females often face more challenges in obtaining leadership positions. Because of this, people’s expectations of females being communal, nicer, more friendly or less assertive is especially prevalent in a domain where they expect strong leadership, like politics or business. Not like teachers and social workers.”
Now in her ninth year at KU, the South Korea native’s expertise focuses on consumer behavior. Her initial research with width-to-height-ratio involved how consumers perceived automobile designs in an article titled “Facing Dominance: Anthropomorphism and the Effect of Product Face Ratios on Consumer Preferences” (also cowritten with Aggarwal) for the Journal of Consumer Research. That triggered her current four-year research project.
“More and more countries are now seeing leadership from females. We can say that dominance and assertiveness and aggression, those are not what make most female leaders successful. They are showing different leadership styles, and that works very well,” Maeng said.
As for whether America will ever politically embrace the idea of a female president, Maeng is cautiously optimistic.
“It is important we can teach or educate people that ‘stronger leadership’ is not always the best, and you can give opportunities for those who don’t have stronger assertive characteristics more chances to be in the role of leadership,” she said. “Then people who experience this can be more open-minded to other types of leaders.”
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