סמינר בשיווק

Speaker:

Carmel Sofer

Radboud University, Nijmegen

The propensity to infer personality traits from faces is common and people are highly confident in their judgments. As a result, face evaluation can have a profound influence on social interactions.

Although, the role of face typicality in face recognition is well established, its relevance for face evaluation is unclear. According to the norm-based model, the typical face’s mental representation is extracted from faces previously seen. The typical face serves as a standard against which all faces are evaluated and all faces are represented as vectors originating from it.

Prior studies which focused mainly on typicality’s influence on attractiveness, have cast doubt on its importance for attractiveness judgments and hence for social perception.

We argue that face typicality is an important factor for social perception because it affects trustworthiness judgments, which approximate the basic evaluation of faces.

We show that for a continuum of faces that vary on a typicality-attractiveness dimension, trustworthiness judgments peak around the typical face. In contrast, perceived attractiveness increases monotonically past the typical face, as faces become more like the most attractive face.

We also show that face typicality is characterized by local, cultural face attributes, which signal group or culture affiliation.

Finally, we add our (culture-specific) face typicality component to existing face evaluation models, which rely on universal cues and show the new model better predicts trustworthiness judgment cross-culturally.