Abstract
People readily make personality attributions to images of strangers' faces. Here we investigated the basis of these personality attributions as made to everyday, naturalistic face images. In a first study, we used 1000 highly varying “ambient image” face photographs to test the correspondence between personality judgments of the Big Five and dimensions known to underlie a range of facial first impressions: approachability, dominance, and youthful-attractiveness. Interestingly, the facial Big Five judgments were found to separate to some extent: judgments of openness, extraversion, emotional stability, and agreeableness were mainly linked to facial first impressions of approachability, whereas conscientiousness judgments involved a combination of approachability and dominance. In a second study we used average face images to investigate which main cues are used by perceivers to make impressions of the Big Five, by extracting consistent cues to impressions from the large variation in the original images. When forming impressions of strangers from highly varying, naturalistic face photographs, perceivers mainly seem to rely on broad facial cues to approachability, such as smiling.
Highlights
By 2013, Facebook had over 1.23bn monthly active users (Sedghi, 2014) and LinkedIn had over 178 million monthly active users (Quantcast, 2014)
Here we evaluate whether people can agree on their judgements of the Big Five dimensions from a much larger and more varied sample of faces than used in previous work, and if so, how these judgments relate to dimensions arising from the facial first impression literature
1 In Study 1, we found that participants could consistently form impressions of the Big Five personality traits from a large set of naturalistic face photographs, such as the kind of photographs that can be viewed while browsing online
Summary
By 2013, Facebook had over 1.23bn monthly active users (Sedghi, 2014) and LinkedIn had over 178 million monthly active users (Quantcast, 2014). It is estimated that half of British adults currently searching for a relationship have used online dating (YouGov, 2014) Since each of these types of online experience frequently involves seeing photographs of strangers’ faces and forming impressions of the people depicted, it would be useful to understand how first impressions are derived from facial photographs. Sutherland and colleagues replicated the approachability (trustworthiness) and dominance dimensions using a large sample of naturally varying images of faces (Sutherland et al, 2013) With this more varied set of faces, Sutherland et al (2013) found another dimension they called “youthful-attractiveness” which seemed to correspond to perceptions of decreasing beauty along with associated age (see Todorov et al, 2015 for a recent review of the facial first impressions literature)
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