Which facial characteristics do people rely on when forming personality impressions? Previous research has uncovered an array of facial features that influence people’s impressions. Even though some ...(classes of) features, such as resemblances to emotional expressions or facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR), play a central role in theories of social perception, their relative importance in impression formation remains unclear. Here, we model faces along a wide range of theoretically important dimensions and use machine learning techniques to test how well 28 features predict impressions of trustworthiness and dominance in a diverse set of 597 faces. In line with overgeneralization theory, emotion resemblances were most predictive of both traits. Other features that have received a lot of attention in the literature, such as fWHR, were relatively uninformative. Our results highlight the importance of modeling faces along a wide range of dimensions to elucidate their relative importance in impression formation.
The emotion disgust motivates the avoidance of pathogens and contaminants. Individuals differ in their tendency to experience disgust and this is referred to as pathogen disgust sensitivity. Yet, it ...remains unclear which differences in psychological processes are captured by pathogen disgust sensitivity. We tested two hypotheses about how the information processing structure underlying pathogen avoidance might give rise to individual differences in pathogen disgust sensitivity. Participants (
n
= 998) rated the perceived health of individuals with or without facial blemishes and indicated how comfortable they would feel about having physical contact with them. For participants with high disgust sensitivity, facial blemishes were more indicative of poor health and perceived health was more strongly related to comfort with physical contact. These findings suggest that pathogen disgust sensitivity reflects individual differences in the tendency to interpret stimuli as an infection risk
and
the weight given to estimated infection risk when deciding who should be approached or avoided.
Trait impressions from faces influence many consequential decisions even in situations in which decisions should not be based on a person's appearance. Here, we test (a) whether people rely on trait ...impressions when making legal sentencing decisions and (b) whether two types of interventions—educating decision-makers and changing the accessibility of facial information—reduce the influence of facial stereotypes. We first introduced a novel legal decision-making paradigm. Results of a pretest (n = 320) showed that defendants with an untrustworthy (vs. trustworthy) facial appearance were found guilty more often. We then tested the effectiveness of different interventions in reducing the influence of facial stereotypes. Educating participants about the biasing effects of facial stereotypes reduced explicit beliefs that personality is reflected in facial features, but did not reduce the influence of facial stereotypes on verdicts (Study 1, n = 979). In Study 2 (n = 975), we presented information sequentially to disrupt the intuitive accessibility of trait impressions. Participants indicated an initial verdict based on case-relevant information and a final verdict based on all information (including facial photographs). The majority of initial sentences were not revised and therefore unbiased. However, most revised sentences were in line with facial stereotypes (e.g., a guilty verdict for an untrustworthy-looking defendant). On average, this actually increased facial bias in verdicts. Together, our findings highlight the persistent influence of trait impressions from faces on legal sentencing decisions.
Impressions of trustworthiness based on facial cues influence many consequential decisions, in spite of their (generally) poor accuracy. Here, we test whether reliance on facial cues can be better ...explained by (a) the belief that facial cues are more valid than other cues or by (b) the quick and primary processing of faces, which makes relying on facial cues relatively effortless. Six studies (N = 2,732 with 73,182 trust decisions) test the two accounts by comparing the effects of facial cues and economic payoffs on trust decisions. People believe that facial cues are less valid than economic payoffs (Study 1) but relying on facial cues takes less time than relying on economic payoffs (Study 2). Critically, introducing facial cues causes people to discount payoff information, but introducing payoff information does not reduce the effect of facial cues (Studies 3a-c). Finally, when making intuitive (vs. reflective) trust decisions, people rely less on payoff information, but they do not rely less on facial cues (Study 4). Together, these findings suggest that persistent reliance on facial trustworthiness is better explained by the intuitive accessibility of facial cues, rather than beliefs that facial cues are particularly valid.
By conforming to ingroup norms, individuals coordinate with other group members, preserve cohesion, and avoid costs of exclusion. Previous experiments have shown that increased concerns about ...infectious disease increase conformity. However, coordination with other group members has multiple benefits, most of which exist independent of pathogenic infection. Hence, a strong causal effect of pathogen avoidance motivations on conformity seems unlikely. Results from five experiments (N = 1,931) showed only limited support for the hypothesis that experimentally increasing pathogen avoidance motivations influences conformity. Overall, our findings are not consistent with the notion that the human mind contains a fast-acting psychological mechanism that regulates conformity as a function of short-term pathogen avoidance motivations.
The factors influencing human female facial attractiveness—symmetry, averageness, and sexual dimorphism—have been extensively studied. However, recent studies, using improved methodologies, have ...called into question their evolutionary utility and links with life history. The current studies use a range of approaches to quantify how important these factors actually are in perceiving attractiveness, through the use of novel statistical analyses and by addressing methodological weaknesses in the literature. Study One examines how manipulations of symmetry, averageness, femininity, and masculinity affect attractiveness using a two-alternative forced choice task, finding that increased masculinity and also femininity decrease attractiveness, compared to unmanipulated faces. Symmetry and averageness yielded a small and large effect, respectively. Study Two utilises a naturalistic ratings paradigm, finding similar effects of averageness and masculinity as Study One but no effects of symmetry and femininity on attractiveness. Study Three applies geometric face measurements of the factors and a random forest machine learning algorithm to predict perceived attractiveness, finding that shape averageness, dimorphism, and skin texture symmetry are useful features capable of relatively accurate predictions, while shape symmetry is uninformative. However, the factors do not explain as much variance in attractiveness as the literature suggests. The implications for future research on attractiveness are discussed.
In this study, we examined how beliefs about farm animal sentience and their suffering vary across culture and demographic characteristics. A total of N = 5027) questionnaires were administered in ...Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the USA. Brazilians showed higher and Chinese lower levels of perceived animal sentience. In Russia and India, the perception of suffering and sentience increases with age, with similar levels to those observed in the USA. In all the countries, more people agreed than disagreed that animals are sentient. Men in India show higher levels of agreement with the relation between eating meat and animal suffering, followed by women in Brazil and China. Lower levels of agreement are observed in Americans and Chinese. Women show higher levels of compassion than men. In Russia, there is a slightly higher level of agreement between men and in the USA younger men agree more. Young American men show higher levels of agreement, while in India and China age has the opposite effect. For fair trading competition, it is important to standardize procedures and respect the demand for both animal protein and its ethical production. Overall, our results showed that perceptions of farm animal sentience and suffering vary substantially across countries and demographic groups. These differences could have important consequences for the perceived ethicality of meat production and consumption, and for global trade in animal products.
People make trait inferences based on facial appearance, and these inferences guide social approach and avoidance. Here, we investigate the effects of textural features on trait impressions from ...faces. In contrast to previous work, which exclusively manipulated skin smoothness, we manipulated smoothness and the presence of skin blemishes independently (Study 1) and orthogonally (Study 2). We hypothesized that people are particularly sensitive to skin blemishes because blemishes potentially indicate poor health and the presence of an infectious disease. We therefore predicted that the negative effect of blemished skin is stronger than the positive effect of smoothed skin. The results of both studies are in line with this reasoning. Across ratings of trustworthiness, competence, maturity, attractiveness, and health, the negative influence of skin blemishes was stronger and more consistent than the positive influence of skin smoothness (Study 1). Moreover, the presence of skin blemishes diminished the positive effect of skin smoothness on attractiveness ratings (Study 2). In sum, both facial skin blemishes and facial skin smoothness influence trait impression, but the negative effect of blemished skin is larger and more salient than the positive effect of smooth skin.
Trustworthiness perceptions are based on facial features that are seen as trustworthy by most people (e.g., resemblance to a smile) and features that are only seen as trustworthy by a specific ...perceiver (e.g., resemblance to a loved one). In other words, trustworthiness perceptions reflect consensual and idiosyncratic judgment components. Yet, when examining the influence of facial cues on social decision‐making previous studies have almost exclusively focused on consensual judgments, ignoring the potential role of idiosyncratic judgments. Results of two studies, with 491 participants making 15,656 trust decisions, showed that consensual and idiosyncratic trustworthiness judgments independently influenced participants’ likelihood to trust an interaction partner, with no significant differences in the magnitude of the effects. These results highlight the need to consider both consensual and idiosyncratic judgments. Previous work, which only focused on the effect of consensual judgments, may have underestimated the overall influence of trustworthiness perceptions on social decision‐making.
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