Hypothesis
Faces perceived as less dominant and more trustworthy reach awareness faster because of their social-emotional meaning.
What failed
Dominance- and untrustworthiness-related slowing replicated for upright faces but was equally strong for inverted faces, where social characteristics are hard to read; the reported correlation between that slowing and self-reported propensity to trust did not replicate; and the dominance effect persisted when only the eye region was shown, inverted and with reversed contrast polarity, conditions in which the traits were no longer discernible. Experiment 3 reproduced this under a preregistered protocol.
Broken assumption
Faster access to awareness for certain faces reflects their social meaning rather than low-level image properties.
Why
The authors conclude that physical differences in the eye region, unrelated to perceived dominance when shown in isolation, parsimoniously explain the effect.
From the published paper: Stein et al. Journal of Experimental Psychology General, 2018. ↗Public domain