When faces shape places: person trustworthiness influences contextual threat

Social perception rarely occurs in isolation: people and places mutually shape one another’s meaning. Prior research has shown that threatening contexts can bias impressions of facial trustworthiness, suggesting that evaluative meaning flows from the environment to the person. Here, we consider the reverse causal direction, testing whether individuals’ trustworthiness can alter evaluations of environmental threat. Across three preregistered experiments (total N = 367), participants judged the threat level of ambiguous visual contexts that included individuals varying on perceived trustworthiness. Experiment 1 showed that untrustworthy faces increased perceived contextual threat relative to neutral or absent faces, an effect that correlated with attributing danger to the target individual. Experiment 2 revealed that this effect was contingent on perceiver perspective: untrustworthy faces heightened threat only when participants evaluated the context from their own viewpoint, not when adopting the target’s perspective. Experiment 3 showed that this face-to-context influence emerged when faces varied in trustworthiness but not competence, indicating that it does not reflect a general negativity bias. Together, these findings establish face–context integration as a process in which social meaning propagates dynamically between person and environment, revealing a fundamental mechanism of relational meaning construction in social cognition.