Walker Mirella, Vetter Thomas
Computer Science Department, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
J Vis. 2009 Oct 13;9(11):12.1-13. doi: 10.1167/9.11.12.
The social judgments people make on the basis of the facial appearance of strangers strongly affect their behavior in different contexts. However, almost nothing is known about the physical information underlying these judgments. In this article, we present a new technology (a) to quantify the information in faces that is used for social judgments and (b) to manipulate the image of a human face in a way which is almost imperceptible but changes the personality traits ascribed to the depicted person. This method was developed in a high-dimensional face space by identifying vectors that capture maximum variability in judgments of personality traits. Our method of manipulating the salience of these vectors in faces was successfully transferred to novel photographs from an independent database. We evaluated this method by showing pairs of face photographs which differed only in the salience of one of six personality traits. Subjects were asked to decide which face was more extreme with respect to the trait in question. Results show that the image manipulation produced the intended attribution effect. All response accuracies were significantly above chance level. This approach to understanding and manipulating how a person is socially perceived could be useful in psychological research and could also be applied in advertising or the film industries.
人们基于陌生人的面部外观做出的社会判断，在不同情境中会强烈影响他们的行为。然而，对于这些判断背后的身体信息，我们几乎一无所知。在本文中，我们提出了一种新技术：（a）量化用于社会判断的面部信息；（b）以几乎难以察觉的方式操纵人脸图像，但会改变赋予所描绘人物的性格特征。该方法是在高维人脸空间中通过识别在性格特征判断中捕获最大变异性的向量而开发的。我们操纵这些向量在面部的显著性的方法成功地应用于来自独立数据库的新照片。我们通过展示仅在六种性格特征之一的显著性上有所不同的人脸照片对来评估此方法。要求受试者判断哪张脸在相关特征方面更为极端。结果表明，图像操纵产生了预期的归因效应。所有反应准确率均显著高于随机水平。这种理解和操纵人们如何被社会感知的方法，在心理学研究中可能有用，也可应用于广告或电影行业。
