Assistant Professor DongWon Oh

Welcome to the MSPS Colloquium with guest speaker Assistant Professor DongWon Oh

The Architecture of Social Perception: Personal and Environmental Forces

First impressions from faces powerfully impact real-world outcomes, from hiring decisions to criminal sentencing, yet we poorly understand their cognitive foundations. Across multiple investigations, we demonstrate how facial impressions arise from both internal cognitive tendencies and external cultural learning. We first find that individuals' personality understanding is shaped by projecting their own self personality trait structure and applying their cognitive style (e.g., uncertainty avoidance). Furthermore, the personality characteristics prevalent in one's cultural environment guide how local populations perceive personality traits from faces. The culture's effect persists even after we control for language and other cultural variables. Our work reveals how seemingly automatic face impressions actually reflect learned associations at both individual and cultural levels, suggesting these associations are malleable rather than fixed. This multi-level account of impression formation provides insights for addressing biased social perception and stereotyping.

About Assistant Professor DongWon Oh

DongWon Oh studies how people form impressions of others, examining how individual personality, cultural context, and strategic self-presentation shape social perception. He uses multi-level modeling, computational modeling, eye-tracking, and virtual reality to understand these processes. He is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. Prior to his current position, he worked as a postdoc at New York University and Columbia University in the U.S. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton University. He was named an APS (Association for Psychological Science) Rising Star and SESP (Society of Experimental Social Psychology) Fellow in 2024.

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