Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA.
Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA.
Nat Commun. 2021 Aug 27;12(1):5168. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-25500-y.
People readily (but often inaccurately) attribute traits to others based on faces. While the details of attributions depend on the language available to describe social traits, psychological theories argue that two or three dimensions (such as valence and dominance) summarize social trait attributions from faces. However, prior work has used only a small number of trait words (12 to 18), limiting conclusions to date. In two large-scale, preregistered studies we ask participants to rate 100 faces (obtained from existing face stimuli sets), using a list of 100 English trait words that we derived using deep neural network analysis of words that have been used by other participants in prior studies to describe faces. In study 1 we find that these attributions are best described by four psychological dimensions, which we interpret as "warmth", "competence", "femininity", and "youth". In study 2 we partially reproduce these four dimensions using the same stimuli among additional participant raters from multiple regions around the world, in both aggregated and individual-level data. These results provide a comprehensive characterization of trait attributions from faces, although we note our conclusions are limited by the scope of our study (in particular we note only white faces and English trait words were included).
人们根据面孔很容易（但通常不准确）将特征归因于他人。虽然归因的细节取决于可用的语言来描述社会特征，但心理学理论认为，两个或三个维度（如效价和支配地位）可以概括来自面孔的社会特征归因。然而，之前的工作仅使用了少量的特征词（12 到 18 个），这限制了迄今为止的结论。在两项大规模的、预先注册的研究中，我们要求参与者使用我们通过对其他参与者在之前研究中用来描述面孔的单词进行深度神经网络分析而得出的 100 个英语特征词列表，对 100 张面孔进行评分。在研究 1 中，我们发现这些归因可以最好地用四个心理学维度来描述，我们将其解释为“温暖”、“能力”、“女性化”和“年轻”。在研究 2 中，我们在来自世界各地多个地区的额外参与者评分者中使用相同的刺激物，在聚合和个体层面的数据中部分重现了这四个维度。这些结果提供了对来自面孔的特征归因的全面描述，尽管我们注意到我们的结论受到研究范围的限制（特别是我们只注意到包括了白人面孔和英语特征词）。
