Where Do First Impressions of Faces Come From?


The next time you are waiting to pay for your groceries or your morning coffee, take a look at the people around you and ask yourself: Whom would I trust? Who looks like they would have my back in a fight? You will probably find that it is relatively easy to form impressions of others based on their appearance. Research has shown that, in spite of the old adage not to judge a book by its cover, we intuitively judge how trustworthy or dominant others are based on their facial appearance. But where do these first impressions come from?

Dozens, if not hundreds, of studies have been published on this topic. To name just a few, previous studies found that people are perceived as more trustworthy if look attractive, if they have a relatively narrow face, if they have baby-like facial features, and if they appear to be smiling ever so slightly (even when they are completely neutral).

So do we rely on all these features when judging others’ trustworthiness? It’s difficult to say. Most studies only looked at one facial feature at a time, which makes it difficult to understand if people are actually relying on that facial feature, or on another related one. Imagine you are trying to understand what kind of muffin Charlie likes best. You note down the colors of the muffins he chooses and observe that Charlie is always picking light over dark muffins. You might conclude that Charlie likes light-colored muffins. However, you could be easily mistaken. Charlie might only pick the light ones because they are the ones that have blueberries in them. Based on our observations we could easily draw the wrong conclusion that it’s one thing (light color) even though it is actually another (blueberries).

Is It The Muffin’s Color or the Blueberries?

The same logic applies to understanding which facial features people rely on when forming first impressions. Many facial features go together. People who appear happy are also seen as more attractive, people with wider faces are also seen as more baby-like, and so on. To address this problem, Alex Jones and I measured emotionally neutral faces on many different dimensions and we let all facial characteristics compete against each other to test how much each one influences observers’ ratings of trustworthiness and dominance.

We analyzed almost 600 face images from the Chicago Face Database. All of the target people were U.S. Americans, but they varied on gender, age, race, and many other characteristics. The targets were photographed with a neutral facial expression in front of a uniform background. Then the images were rated by more than 1,000 U.S. American raters on many different dimensions: trustworthiness, dominance, attractiveness, babyfacedness, and so on. Other characteristics like facial width-to-height ratio, were measured with computer software. In the end, we had a large data set that allowed us to predict impressions of trustworthiness and dominance from many different facial characteristics (28 in total)—some of which have been the focus of many previous studies (e.g., facial width-to-height ratio, attractiveness, babyfacedness), and some which have received relatively less attention (such as gender, age, and race).

When we compared the unique predictive power of all facial characteristics, some findings from earlier studies didn’t come out: in fact, some of those facial features did surprisingly poorly. For example, how narrow or wide a face is was not very informative for predicting how trustworthy or dominant it was perceived to be. Characteristics like attractiveness (attractive people are seen as more trustworthy) and gender (men are seen as more dominant than women) were more important. But the strongest influence on impressions was how much the facial features resembled emotional expressions. People who appear to be smiling (even when they are neutral) are seen as trustworthy and people who appear to be angry are perceived as dominant. This process is called “emotion overgeneralization.”

Emotion overgeneralization is a two-step process. First, there is our oversensitive emotion detection system. We are constantly on the look-out for emotional signals. This makes a lot of sense because emotional expressions, like a smile or a frown, tell us important things about a person. But we even see emotions when they are not there. Even when a person is not sending any emotional signals, we might detect a smile, just because the corners of their mouth are naturally tilted upwards a little bit.

Then, there is our tendency to overgeneralize. When we think we detect a smile, we not only think that this person is happy right now, but also that this person is happy, sociable, and nice in general. We really want to know what kind of person we are dealing with. That’s why even a fleeting smile, or a facial appearance that resembles a smile, can make us jump to the conclusion that we are dealing with a nice person.

So when we look at someone and immediately think that they cannot be trusted, this is probably not because we are actually able to judge others’ character based on their facial appearance. It may just be our oversensitive emotion detection system.


For Further Reading

Jaeger, B., & Jones, A. L. (2021). Which facial features are central in impression formation? Social Psychological and Personality Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506211034979

Zebrowitz, L. A. (2012). Ecological and social approaches to face perception. In G. Rhodes, A. Calder, M. Johnson, & J. V. Haxby (Eds.), Oxford handbook of face perception. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199559053.013.0003
 

Bastian Jaeger is an Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He studies how first impressions are formed, how accurate they are, and how they guide our behavior.

 

How to Decide Who Will Help Us?


Imagine moving to a new apartment in a foreign city. You bought a table and now you need to assemble it. You find this task rather difficult to do alone. You need someone to help you. But who? You don't know anyone nearby. When you moved in, you met the people in the two apartments next to you. In one apartment lives a young man who has a square jaw, high forehead, and heavy eyebrows, features that you associate with dominance. By contrast, the person in the other apartment has a rounded face, large eyes, thin eyebrows—a babyface—thus he appears more submissive. Which of these two will you ask to help you? How, if at all, does their appearance influence your decision?

We are advised to not “judge a book by its cover,” that is, to not judge others based on their appearance. Yet, one reason for this advice is that in fact, we often do just that. As a result, we also react to a dominant-appearing person quite differently than we react to someone who appears to be submissive. In our research, we tested if people judge the willingness of a person to agree to help a stranger who asks for help, based on how dominant or submissive the prospective helper appears to be. In addition, we explored the influence of the appearance of the person asking for help.

Dominant and submissive appearance are relevant in this situation because these characteristics are associated with attributes that are relevant both to someone seeking another’s help and the potential helper. First, dominant people are assumed to be more competent than submissive people. It is reasonable to assume that when you seek someone’s help you would like your helper to be competent and hence likely more effective. Yet, the fact that the potential helper is competent is an advantage only if this person is willing to give us a hand. In other words, when we ask someone for help we need to estimate the likelihood that they actually will help. And since dominant people are also perceived as less approachable than submissive ones, they may also be seen as less likely to agree to help.

At the same time, how submissive or dominant the person seeking help appears to be may also matter in this scenario. On one hand, people who appear submissive seem less competent and are expected to be more in need of help, hence a potential helper might feel obliged to help. On the other hand, people who seem dominant are the kind of people that are more likely to get what they asked of others. Hence, they may be perceived as ones whose request for help will not be denied.

In our research, participants saw photographs of two men or two women. One was described as seeking help and the other as the potential helper. In some photos, both helper and help-seeker appeared either dominant or submissive, or one had a dominant and the other a submissive appearance. Participants recruited from a crowdsourcing panel first read a story in which a person seeks help and then guessed how likely is the help-seeker to ask the potential helper for help, and how likely is the potential helper to help if asked.

We used different scenarios to describe different help situations. Help was required either to assemble furniture, to find technical information, or to obtain a loan. These contexts were chosen because they involve different forms of effort from the helper. What we found was that in all help domains, the submissive person was judged as the one more likely to agree to help if asked to do so.

Participants also saw submissive appearing people as more caring and helpful by nature. Thus, people prefer potential kindness over competence when it comes to seeking help. However, the dominant or submissive appearance of the person seeking help was not important for judgments of help likelihood or asking for help. In a follow-up study, participants also reported preferring to ask for help from a submissive person when they themselves needed help.

Thus, although we are advised to not judge people by appearance, we seem to make important decisions such as whom to ask for help based on the appearance of the potential helpers. In other domains such as risk-taking tendencies, judgments of dominant people are quite aligned with how dominant people perceive themselves. It is possible that in this context also, people have a rather good sense of the actual likelihood that a dominant-looking or submissive-looking person will help them.  


For Further Reading

Hareli, S., Smoly, M., & Hess, U. (2018). Help me Obi-Wan; The influence of facial dominance on perceptions of helpfulness. Social Influence, 13(3), 163-176. https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2018.1500944


Shlomo Hareli is an Israeli psychologist, Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the Department of Business Administration at the University of Haifa. His research focuses on the social perception of emotions.

Michael Smoly is an Israeli electrical engineer serving as Quality Assurance Manager at INSIGHTEC. Hand in hand with this position, he studied at the Department of Business Administration at the University of Haifa and earned a PhD in business administration.

Ursula Hess is a German psychologist who teaches at the Humboldt-University of Berlin as Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at the Department of Psychology. Her research on the communication of emotions. 

 

“Head-ing” towards a New Understanding of Face Perception

We make quick judgments about other people in all kinds of situations – interviewing a job candidate, walking down a dangerous alleyway, or meeting somebody at a bar, to name a few. When we make judgments about others, one of the first things that happens is that we focus our attention on the person’s face. This is not surprising, as the face contains information relevant to the judgments we want to make, information that can be helpful in answering questions such as: Is this person friendly? Does she like me? Is he competent?

However, in most social interactions, we do not see only people’s faces. Instead, we see their face as it rests upon its physical foundation: the head. Although you might assume that a person’s head is irrelevant to what’s happening on his or her face, our research indicates that subtle head movements can dramatically change the way a person’s face appears and thereby affect other people’s perceptions of the person.

In an article published in Psychological Science, we reported evidence from five studies showing that tilting one’s head downward, even slightly, substantially increases how dominant a person’s face appears to be – even when the face itself remains neutral and inactive. We found that tilting the head down systematically changes the appearance of a person’s face by causing the eyebrows to appear V-shaped.

This V-shape appearance is similar to how people’s eyebrows appear when the corrugator muscle – a facial muscle on the forehead – activates, as it often does when people are angry. (Picture an angry person’s eyebrows slanting and furrowing as he or she glares at you.) Furthermore, activation of the corrugator muscle – and the resulting V-shaped eyebrows – is associated with increased perceptions of social rank and dominance across cultures. So, a slight shift in how people hold their heads can substantially change the appearance of their face, even without the corrugator muscle activating.  And this subtle change makes a person appear more dominant.

In two of our studies, research participants were shown photographs of people holding their heads at a neutral angle or tilting them up or down ten degrees. Participants judged how dominant the person in each photograph appeared by rating them on statements such as “This person would be willing to use aggressive tactics to get his/her way.” Results showed that participants rated individuals who were photographed tilting their heads downward as substantially more dominant than individuals who held their heads at a level angle or tilted them upward.

In another study, we tested whether the effect of head tilt on judgments of dominance was due to the visual illusion involving the eyebrows described above.  As I noted, tilting one’s head down creates a V-shaped eyebrow pattern that mimics corrugator muscle activity. We used Photoshop to replace the eyebrows in a downward-head-tilt photo with the eyebrows from a neutral-head-angle photo to see how people rated a downward-tilted head that didn’t have the V-shaped eyebrows. If tilting the head downward increases perceptions of dominance by changing the appearance of the eyebrows, this effect should not occur when the person’s eyebrows are in a neutral position, even if the head is tilted downward. This is exactly what we found: a downward head tilt increased ratings of the person’s dominance only if the eyebrows had a V-shaped appearance.

In a final study, we recruited two samples of participants. One sample (we’ll call them “targets”) were photographed posing neutral facial expressions both while tilting their heads downward and while holding them at a neutral angle. The other sample (we’ll call them “judges”) then viewed these photographs and rated the person’s dominance. We replicated our finding that targets who titled their heads downward were perceived as more dominant.

Then, we precisely measured the degree of V-shape of targets’ eyebrows in all of the photographs and found that targets who tilted their heads downward had more strongly V-shaped eyebrows compared to those who held their heads at a neutral angle. Finally, we found that the increased eyebrow V-shape in these images was linked to higher ratings of dominance. This finding explained why judges perceived downwards-tilted faces – which had more angular V-shaped eyebrows – as more dominant.

Together, these findings show that seemingly neutral, unexpressive faces can communicate social information depending on how the person’s head is positioned. Furthermore, like facial expressions, head movement can affect people’s perceptions of a person by changing the appearance of the person’s face. As a result, when we form judgments about other people – whether on a date, in a job interview, or when passing somebody on the street – we may focus our attention on their face, but our perceptions of them are affected by more than their face alone.


For Further Reading:

Witkower, Z., & Tracy, J. L. (2019). A facial-action imposter: How head tilt influences perceptions of dominance from a neutral face. Psychological Science30(6), 893-906.

Witkower, Z., Tracy, J. L., Cheng, J. T., & Henrich, J. (in press). Two signals of social rank: Prestige and dominance are associated with distinct nonverbal displays. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.


Zak Witkower is a PhD student studying Social/Personality Psychology at the University of British Columbia.  Jessica Tracy is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and a Sauder Distinguished Scholar. 

Why People Aggress

Human aggression is among the greatest dangers to the welfare if not the very survival of our species. Each year, millions of people around the globe are victims of interpersonal aggression, in the form of domestic violence, robberies, rape, and homicide.  What is it about human psychology that allows aggression to spin out of control, like a hurricane destroying everything in its path?

A famous early hypothesis tied aggression to frustration, the thwarting of one's progress toward one's goals. It suggested that people aggress only when frustrated, and any act of aggression is a consequence of some frustration. This strong version of the hypothesis was quickly abandoned as scholars realized that frustration does not inevitably lead to aggression, though they continued to maintain that any aggression is in response to frustration. In this version of the hypothesis, frustration was seen as a necessary, though not a sufficient condition for aggression.

Our work on the frustration-aggression connection asked a basic question: why should frustration lead to aggression in the first place? What function does aggression serve that makes it a fitting response to frustration? The answer to this question not only illuminates the frustration-aggression connection; it also casts light on the psychological essence of human aggression. 

In reviewing past studies that manipulated frustration and observed whether aggression occurs in response, my colleagues and I noted something curious. Typically, the 'frustration' involved subjecting research participants to insults, humiliation, and put-downs. These circumstances indeed elicit an aggressive response. Interestingly, however, when the induced frustration did not entail humiliation (e.g. a bus doesn't stop for you at the bus stop but you see that it is "out of service"), no aggressive response occurred.

This observation suggested an intriguing possibility: that frustration is understood as significance loss, by which we mean a reduction in one's sense of social worth, dignity, and mattering. In other words, frustration as such may not elicit aggression—only frustration of one's need for significance.

That realization solved another puzzle that had mystified us: Why should frustration elicit aggression in the first place as opposed to, say, withdrawal, escape, sulking, etc.? Aggression is a primordial way of asserting one's power, dominance, and hence significance. This notion is shared by evolutionary psychologists and lay observers alike. Chairman Mao Zedong famously proclaimed that "Power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Jean-Paul Sartre, in his preface to Franz Fanon's anti-colonialist classic "The Wretched of the Earth," stated that "irrepressible violence …is man recreating himself" and that it is through "mad fury" that the "wretched of the earth" can "become men."

The view that it is significance loss that elicits aggression is consistent with the large body of research on the frustration-aggression hypothesis as well as supported by new research conducted by our team.

One of our studies involved 272 "incels," members of an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually, and are known to be hostile and verbally aggressive toward women and toward sexually active men.  We found a positive association between participants' significance loss and their willingness to commit rape, moderated by participants' expressed admiration for Elliot Rodger, who in a fit of misogynous rage killed six people in Isla Vista, California. In other words, significance loss predicts hostility toward women.

In another study, we conducted an automated text analysis of Yelp reviews of coffee shops in Austin, Texas, and of U.S. hotels. Within both data sets, terms like "humiliation", "shame" or "insult" related to significance loss people experienced at the evaluated establishments were negatively related to the number of Yelp review stars they assigned to a given coffee shop or hotel.

These and other studies support the idea that aggression is an evolved response to significance loss, a primitive way to restore a sense of significance. This notion has an important implication, namely that aggression isn't a fundamental need as Freud and other instinct theorists have surmised, but rather a means to the attainment of significance that can be substituted by other, prosocial means to the same end.  If so, there is room for hope that cultivating the latter means, as well as creating a just society where people feel significant and respected, will ultimately conquer the monster of human aggressiveness. 


Further Readings

Kruglanski, A.W., Ellenberg, M., Szumowska, E., Molinario, E. Speckhard, A., Leander, N.P., Pierro, A. Di Cicco, G. & Bushman, B. (2023). Frustration-Aggression hypothesis reconsidered: The role of significance quest. Aggressive Behavior, 49, 445-468https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.22092

Kruglanski, A.W., Molinario, E., Jasko, K. Webber, D., Leander, N.P. & Pierro, A. (2022). Significance Quest Theory. Perspectives in Psychological Science, 49, (17), 1-22.  https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211034825
 

Arie Kruglanski is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park.  He has served as editor of several scientific journals and as President of the Society for the Study of Motivation. He studies human judgment and decision-making, the interface between motivation and cognition, group and intergroup processes, the psychology of human goals, and the social psychological aspects of terrorism.

Why Are Some Powerful People Unethical?

Whether in the public arena or in informal contexts, people with power often engage in unethical behaviors. Endless news stories cover the latest political or business scandals that involve dishonesty and moral transgressions. Most of us can share personal accounts, such as working for a particularly mean boss, who does not seem to care much for rules or fear repercussions. A case in point is the widespread breaking of COVID-19 containment rules in 2020 by top British politicians including the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson.

Although it is a common belief that power corrupts, where opinions diverge is whether the experience of power over others makes normal people dishonest, or whether bad people become powerful in competitive societies. Disentangling these questions was our goal.

To do this, we examined the role of a dominant personality. Our definition of dominance was the habitual display of assertive and forceful behavior. Through such behavior, people with dominant personalities incite fear in others and attain status or power. Powerful people frequently appear dominant (think Donald Trump and Elon Musk). The observation that socially powerful positions are over-populated by dominant people is backed up by research. Dominant people gain influence because they behave in ways that signal competence, regardless of actual ability. They are efficient in learning how to attain self-advantages, and force others to comply. Dominance is also associated with various anti-social inclinations, such as hubris and narcissism. Dominant people are often entitled and believe themselves to be invincible.

But are dominant people more likely to be dishonest? Existing research on this question is less clear.

By combining these insights, we investigated whether powerful people behaving badly could be explained by high positions of society being crowded with dominant people, rather than caused by power itself. By establishing whether dominant people are more unethical compared to less dominant people, we were able to separate the effects of personality and power positions on unethical behavior.

We focused on the summer of 2020 when the British Government enforced strict COVID-19 containment rules across the country. On the surface, consistent with the stereotype that power corrupts, London residents in higher professional positions were more likely to break COVID rules, compared to those in lower professional positions. However, we found that this was due to the high concentration of dominant people taking up the higher positions. That is, dominant people were more likely to break COVID rules, and this tendency combined with the overlap between dominant people and high-powered people was the real reason that the breaking of COVID containment rules was pronounced among higher professional positions. Dominant Londoners felt entitled, and believed they were unlikely to suffer badly from getting COVID, which explained why they broke the rules.

The findings from this study were corroborated in an experiment. We recruited employed adults across the United Kingdom and found that managers lied more than subordinates to receive money. However, this was again explained by these managers already having dominant personalities. In other experiments, dominant people believed powerful roles suited them well, and wanted to have social power when given a choice, to a higher degree than their peers who were not as dominant. Such preference for powerful positions was evident even when they had no prior experience or expertise in the subject matter. This shows that dominant people are likely to put themselves forward when opportunities for power and career advancement become available.

Our research points to the possibility that the real reason the powerful misbehave is because individuals with dominant personalities rise to higher positions in the competitive societies we examined. Because dominant people also happen to be likely cheaters, instances of the powerful behaving unethically would increase.

Not all competitive hierarchies are favorable to the dominant, however, which provides food for thought. In academia, a specialist field where expert knowledge in subject matter is a pre-requisite for career advancement (more so than in… let's say politics), dominance did not coincide with higher positions. On the other hand, prestige, which is the garnering of respect based on reputation and experience, was closely tied to power and influence. Across multiple contexts, having prestige was not related to unethical behavior.

Advice for Organizations

What this means for organizations is this: When they look to promote individuals, they should actively look beyond the loud and pushy people who raise their hands, to those who may have expertise and experience, but are less inclined to put themselves in the limelight. Employers should carefully set apart indicators of competence from the confidence that dominant people display. This difficult but crucial separation could save organizations from the pitfalls of unethical leadership. Going further, it raises the possibility that at a societal level, the kind of people we like and choose as our leaders may be the hidden reason behind their frequent unethical behaviors.


For Further Reading

Kim, K., & Guinote, A. (2022). Cheating at the top: Trait dominance explains dishonesty more consistently than social power. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 48(12). https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211051481


Kyoo Hwa Kim holds a PhD from University College London in Experimental Psychology and her research investigates unethical behaviors individuals make under competition or organizational pressures.

Ana Guinote is Professor of Social Cognition at University College London. Her research examines the various ways in which social power influences social cognition and behavior. 

Adelheid Nicol

Adelheid Nicol is an Associate Professor at the Military Psychology and Leadership Department of the Royal Military College of Canada. She obtained her B.Sc. from McGill University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario. Her interests are in the areas of honesty/integrity testing, personality testing, and prejudice.

What led you to choose a career in personality and social psychology?

I learned quite a bit about personality and social psychology while completing my graduate studies in Industrial/Organizational (I/O) psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Although I was pursuing a PhD in I/O in order to become a consultant, my desire to continue learning pulled me in the direction of academe. I was fortunate enough to get a faculty position at the Royal Military College of Canada where I refashioned my research to focus on prejudice.

Briefly summarize your current research, and any future research interests you plan to pursue. 

My present research interests center on studying the underlying natures of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA), as well as the role they play within the workplace, particularly a military environment. Not coming from a military background, I was interested in the stereotypes that I and others have about the military and wanted to examine the role SDO and RWA play for this group.

Why did you join SPSP?

A graduate student from another university praised SPSP for the quality of their conferences and reasonably priced membership fees. I read a bit about SPSP and decided to join.

How has being a member of SPSP helped to advance your career? 

Keeping abreast of the literature by skimming the SPSP publications is important in the development and delivery of many of the courses that I teach and in the development of research ideas.

Do you have any advice for individuals who wish to pursue a career in personality and social psychology?

While pursuing graduate studies, take as many statistics courses as possible (I didn’t and I regret that!).

Outside of psychology, how do you spend your free time?

Most of my free time is spent being with my three children as much as possible: playing, talking, listening, learning, teaching.  (Oh, ya, there is also the cooking, cleaning, etc. that comes with having a family.) I also enjoy being physically active as much as possible, with my family or on my own.