The COVID-19 pandemic has caused controversy over new norms of mask-wearing in public places. An online experiment previously showed that people from several Spanish-speaking countries perceived faces wearing medical-style masks as more trustworthy, socially desirable, and likely to be ill, compared to control faces without a mask. We replicated and extended these methods with 1241 English-speaking participants from the UK and USA, adding questions on political orientation and voting intention,

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... and including the online-VAAST task to test the effects of masks on an implicit reaction-time measure. The positive effects of masks on trustworthiness and social desirability were replicated, but the negative effect of masks on perceptions of healthiness was reversed. Participants were also quicker to approach masked faces. Conservative voters' explicit and implicit reactions to masked faces were less favorable than those of liberals, demonstrating that masks are viewed positively by many but continue to be politically controversial.