In most psychology papers, either women are better than men at identifying faces or there is no gender difference.
But it turns out that there is one type of face that men are better at identifying than women: the faces on Transformer toys. Except at the age they tested, boys were a lot more likely to have played with Transformers. By testing people’s ability to identify the faces of the toys they played with as children, and assuming that men played more with Transformers then Barbies when they were younger, and vice versa for women, they confirmed by surveying people about their experience playing with these toys and then designed a study that compared men’s and women’s ability to recognize male faces, female faces, Barbie doll faces, Transformer faces and, as a control category, different kinds of cars.
The test consisted of giving participants a group of six images to study, and then presenting them with a series of trials that showed them three images – one from the initial set and two that they hadn’t seen before – and asking them to identify the familiar image. They did this with male faces, female faces, Barbie doll faces, Transformer faces and different automobiles. It may seem like Transformers all look a lot alike, and owners of Barbie dolls note the same thing about those.
The researchers administered the test to 295 people: 161 men and 134 women. Some took the test in a laboratory and some took it online through the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowd-sourcing website that psychologists have begun using to conduct large studies. One advantage of the online platform is that the researchers can sample a more diverse population in terms of age, ethnicity and socio-economic status, relative to laboratory studies that generally test undergraduate students.
Men slightly outperformed women when recognizing cars and, in this study, men and women performed equally well with human faces. Women had a small but statistically significant advantage at identifying Barbie faces while men had a small but statistically significant advantage in identifying Transformer faces.
The psychologists considered the possibility that the male advantage was because the participants treated the Transformers as objects rather than faces. Previous studies have shown that men are sometimes better than women recognizing vehicles like cars, planes or motorcycles. That is why the researchers included the automobile recognition task.
The researchers addressed this question by looking at individual differences. They found that those people who were best at recognizing human faces were generally those who were best at recognizing Transformer faces and Barbie faces. In contrast, there was a weaker relation between performance with toy faces and cars, leading them to conclude that the participants were reacting to the toy faces as faces, not as objects.