Abstract
People readily (but often inaccurately) attribute traits to others based on faces. While the details of attributions depend on the language available to describe social traits, psychological theories argue that two or three dimensions (such as valence and dominance) summarize social trait attributions from faces. However, prior work has used only a small number of trait words (12 to 18), limiting conclusions to date. In two large-scale, preregistered studies we ask participants to rate 100 faces (obtained from existing face stimuli sets), using a list of 100 English trait words that we derived using deep neural network analysis of words that have been used by other participants in prior studies to describe faces. In study 1 we find that these attributions are best described by four psychological dimensions, which we interpret as “warmth”, “competence”, “femininity”, and “youth”. In study 2 we partially reproduce these four dimensions using the same stimuli among additional participant raters from multiple regions around the world, in both aggregated and individual-level data. These results provide a comprehensive characterization of trait attributions from faces, although we note our conclusions are limited by the scope of our study (in particular we note only white faces and English trait words were included).
Highlights
IntroductionPeople readily (but often inaccurately) attribute traits to others based on faces. While the details of attributions depend on the language available to describe social traits, psychological theories argue that two or three dimensions (such as valence and dominance) summarize social trait attributions from faces
People readily attribute traits to others based on faces
Despite the considerable amount of work on the topic[3,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22], it remains unclear how people make these rapid attributions: do they have distinct representations for each of the hundreds of possible words that describe somebody based on the face, or do they map their attributions of the face into a much lower-dimensional psychological space? By analogy, we can perceive many different shades of colors but they are all the result of a three-dimensional color space
Summary
People readily (but often inaccurately) attribute traits to others based on faces. While the details of attributions depend on the language available to describe social traits, psychological theories argue that two or three dimensions (such as valence and dominance) summarize social trait attributions from faces. In study 2 we partially reproduce these four dimensions using the same stimuli among additional participant raters from multiple regions around the world, in both aggregated and individual-level data These results provide a comprehensive characterization of trait attributions from faces, we note our conclusions are limited by the scope of our study (in particular we note only white faces and English trait words were included). We argue that to understand the comprehensive dimensionality of trait attributions from faces, it is essential to investigate a more comprehensively sampled set of trait words To meet this challenge, we assembled an extensive list of English trait words that people use to describe faces from multiple sources[1,2,3,8,10,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,22,37,38,39] and applied a data-driven approach with a pretrained neural network to derive a representative subset of 100 traits (Fig. 1a–d). All experiments were preregistered on the Open Science Framework (see Methods)
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