Disfluent Processing of Nonverbal Cues Helps to Explain Anti-Bisexual Prejudice

Recent studies have documented that metacognitive processes underlying social perception contribute to interpersonal prejudice. For example, individuals categorized as lesbian/gay on the basis of their physical appearance are processed disfluently, and such disfluent processing arouses negative social evaluations. Although this pattern of results has replicated across several independent samples, evidence for the social consequences of perceptual disfluency remains limited to a handful of stigmatized groups. Here, we tested disfluency’s effects among a social group that has received scant attention in research on social perception—namely, bisexual individuals. We found that (a) perceivers achieved above-chance accuracy categorizing targets as bisexual versus not bisexual based upon facial photographs, (b) gender-atypical facial features were associated with bisexual categorizations, (c) targets who were categorized as bisexual and targets who personally identified as bisexual were evaluated more negatively than those who were not categorized/identified as bisexual, and (d) disfluent processing of nonverbal cues—especially gendered cues—helped to explain anti-bisexual prejudice. Collectively, these findings contribute to the growing literature on perceptions of sexual orientation and highlight the generalizability of perceptual fluency for understanding diverse forms of prejudice that arise in the early moments of social perception.