Can You Know If Someone's Friendly Just By Looking at His Face? Maybe Not

Would you believe we think we can tell other peoples personalities based on their faces? 

Well, if we have pre-existing beliefs about how personality works, that's how we judge personality.  It all depends on our pre-existing beliefs about how personality actually works, newswise.com reports.

"We make snap judgments of others based not only on their facial appearance, but also on our pre-existing beliefs about how others’ personalities work, finds a new study by a team of psychology researchers," the web site explains.

A new study led by Jonathan Freeman, the paper’s senior author and an associate professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, underscores how we interpret others’ facial features to form impressions of their personalities. 

"People form personality impressions from others’ facial appearance within only a few hundred milliseconds,” observes Freeman. 

“Our findings suggest that face impressions are shaped not only by a face’s specific features but also by our own beliefs about personality—for instance, the cues that make a face look competent and make a face look friendly are physically more similar for those who believe competence and friendliness co-occur in other people’s personalities. 

“Although these impressions are highly reliable, they are often quite inaccurate,” Freeman adds. “And yet they are consequential, as previous research has found face impressions to predict a range of real-world outcomes, from political elections, to hiring decisions, criminal sentencing, or dating. Initial impressions of faces can bias how we interact and make critical decisions about people, and so understanding the mechanisms behind these impressions is important for developing techniques to reduce biases based on facial features that typically operate outside of awareness.” 

Experts have long known that people make some personality impressions of others based merely upon their facial appearance. "For instance, we see those with babyish features as agreeable and harmless and those with faces that resemble anger as dishonest and unfriendly," newswise reports.

What’s less clear is how widespread this process is and how, precisely, it transpires.

In the study, the researchers explored these questions through a series of experiments, specifically seeking to determine whether our own pre-existing beliefs about how personality works affect the way we “see” it on others’ faces.

The experiments’ 920 subjects indicated how much they believed different traits co-occur in other people's personalities, according to the web site. For example, they would indicate how much they believe competence co-occurs with friendliness in others. The subjects were each then shown dozens of faces on a computer screen and quickly judged those faces on competence and friendliness, allowing the researchers to see if subjects thought the same faces that are competent are also friendly—or not friendly.

In all, subjects were asked about several personality traits, including the following: “agreeable,” “aggressive,” “assertive,” “caring,” “competent,” “conscientious,” “confident,” “creative,” “dominant,” “egotistic,” “emotionally stable,” “extroverted,” “intelligent,” “mean,” “neurotic,” “open to experience,” “responsible,” “self-disciplined,” “sociable,” “trustworthy,” “unhappy,” and “weird.”

Overall, the findings confirmed what the researchers predicted. The more that subjects believed any two traits, such as competence and friendliness, co-occurs in others predicted their impressions of those two traits on faces to be more similar.

The study's results also provide an explanation for how people can make so many different impressions of someone just from a handful of features present on a face. 

“We may only see cues in a face that directly elicit several personality impressions, such as ‘submissiveness’ for those who have ‘baby faces,’ ” observes Ryan Stolier, lead author of the paper and doctoral candidate in NYU’s Department of Psychology. “However, the perceptual system may take these few impressions and add them together, such that we see a face as conscientious or religious, to the extent we think the personality judgment is related to those impressions we initially make from a face—such as agreeableness and submissiveness.”