Personality in Perspective: Judgmental Consistency across Orientations of the Face

Abstract

Introduction Whether sitting on a park bench, passing on the street, or stealing glances in a bar, we are constantly forming impressions of others (Ambady et al 2000). These impressions are rarely based on head-on encounters. Rather, we use the information available to us, and our impressions are often based on glimpses of people in profile or other partial views. There have been numerous studies on impressions from faces, usually as observed from frontal views (see Zebrowitz 1997). As a result, few of these studies have examined inferences made from limited informationösuch as partial views of the face. Most typically, what we know about judgments of others from their faces comes from examinations of the full-frontal view. In the current work, we explored inferences of personality from three-quarter and profile views of the face, as compared against full-frontal view (control). Several previous studies have explored inferences of personality from individuals' faces. In one study, Zebrowitz et al (1993) found consensus in ratings of a multitude of personality (dominance, warmth, physical strength, honesty, shrewdness) and physiognomic (attractiveness and facial maturity) traits for White American, Black American, and Korean targets judged from frontal views of faces. In addition, they showed that these judgments were consistent across raters for perceivers from both cultures. In addition, Albright et al (1997) found that judgments of Big-5 personality traits (culture, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability) and attractiveness were judged consistently by both American and Chinese perceivers for faces from their own culture and extraversion and agreeableness were judged consistently across cultures. Recently, judgments of personality from the face have been found to predict important outcomes. For example, judgments of competence from the face have been shown to successfully predict the outcome of American political elections (Todorov et al 2005). Similarly, judgments of power (as composed of competence, dominance, and

Social Attributions from Faces: Determinants, Consequences, Accuracy, and Functional Significance

“…The only effect of additional time was to increase confidence in judgments. Subsequently, these findings have been replicated many times with better masking procedures to control the exact presentation of faces and with ever-shortening presentations (Ballew & Todorov 2007; Bar et al 2006;Borkenau et al 2009;Porter et al 2008;Rule et al 2009a;Todorov et al 2009Todorov et al , 2010. Now we know that exposure of as little as 34 milliseconds to a face is sufficient for people to form an impression and that these impressions do not change with exposures longer than 200 milliseconds.…”

Perceptions of Dominance following Glimpses of Faces and Bodies

“…Although other research has investigated judgments of traits (including dominance) at speeded durations (eg Rule et al 2009b), those judgments were based on structural cues of non-expressive faces. A merging of the current and previous work would therefore explore how natural expressions of dominance in bodies and faces are assessed, such as those culled from individuals who self-report dominant (versus submissive) dispositions, or individuals actively engaged in dominant versus subordinate behavioral roles (see also Hall et al 2001).…”

“…Thus, we focused more on the capacity for perceivers to detect important and obvious behavioral cues under physical and temporal constraints as opposed to measuring the natural manifestation of these cues according to various social conditions. Moreover, in contrast to earlier work which tested the consensus of impressions of traits like dominance from neutral faces (eg Rule et al 2009b), here we examined the accuracy of judgments of dominance by using stimuli that objectively conveyed cues associated with actual dominant and submissive behaviors (see Carney et al 2005Carney et al , 2010Hall et al 2005;Mazur 2005). Compared to many other traits and dispositions, dominance is interesting because it shows stable differences between individuals, yet also has discrete behavioral manifestations that display its relative levels (eg Goldberg et al 2006).…”

Eye Gaze and Head Posture Jointly Influence Judgments of Dominance, Physical Strength, and Anger

“…Changes of faces and heads across time and space may provide more valid information to the perceivers (McArthur and Baron, 1983;Zebrowitz, 2011). In daily interactions, heads are viewed in multiple positions or, in other words, in multiple postures (Jenkins et al, 2011;Rule, Ambady, & Adams, 2009;Sutherland, Young, & Rhodes, 2017;Todorov & Porter, 2014) and with different gazes (Tipper & Bayliss, 2011). These two nonverbal cues, posture and gaze, are a part of social status displays (Chiao et al, 2008;Chiao, 2010).…”