Abstract
There is ample evidence that morphological and social cues in a human face provide signals of human personality and behaviour. Previous studies have discovered associations between the features of artificial composite facial images and attributions of personality traits by human experts. We present new findings demonstrating the statistically significant prediction of a wider set of personality features (all the Big Five personality traits) for both men and women using real-life static facial images. Volunteer participants (N = 12,447) provided their face photographs (31,367 images) and completed a self-report measure of the Big Five traits. We trained a cascade of artificial neural networks (ANNs) on a large labelled dataset to predict self-reported Big Five scores. The highest correlations between observed and predicted personality scores were found for conscientiousness (0.360 for men and 0.335 for women) and the mean effect size was 0.243, exceeding the results obtained in prior studies using ‘selfies’. The findings strongly support the possibility of predicting multidimensional personality profiles from static facial images using ANNs trained on large labelled datasets. Future research could investigate the relative contribution of morphological features of the face and other characteristics of facial images to predicting personality.
Highlights
There is ample evidence that morphological and social cues in a human face provide signals of human personality and behaviour
Another widely studied indicator is the facial width to height ratio, which has been linked to various traits, such as achievement striving[10], deception[11], dominance[12], aggressiveness[13,14,15,16], and risk-taking[17]
This study presents new evidence confirming that human personality is related to individual facial appearance
Summary
There is ample evidence that morphological and social cues in a human face provide signals of human personality and behaviour. In addition to emotional expressions and other nonverbal behaviours conveying information about one’s psychological processes through the face, research has found that valid inferences about personality characteristics can even be made based on static images of the face with a neutral expression[5,6,7]. These findings suggest that people may use signals from each other’s faces to adjust the ways they communicate, depending on the emotional reactions and perceived personality of the interlocutor. Artificial feature manipulation Walker & Vetter, 2016, Study 3 Composite facial images Little & Perrett, 2007 Penton-Voak et al, Study 2 Kramer & Ward, 2010 Realistic photographs Penton-Voak et al 2006, Study 1 Qui et al 2015, Selfies Borkenau et al, 2009 Naumann et al, 2009, Standard Naumann et al, 2009, Spontaneous Machine learning models Hu et al, 2017, Male faces Hu et al, 2017, Female faces
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