Which Facial Features Are Central in Impression Formation?

Which facial characteristics do people rely on when forming personality impressions? Previous research has uncovered an array of features that influence people’s impressions. Even though some (classes of) features, such as resemblances to emotional expressions or width-to-height ratio (fWHR), play a central role in theories social perception, their relative importance impression formation remains unclear. Here, we model faces along wide range theoretically important dimensions and use machine learning techniques test how well 28 predict impressions trustworthiness dominance diverse set 597 faces. In line with overgeneralization theory, emotion were most predictive both traits. Other have received lot attention the literature, fWHR, relatively uninformative. Our results highlight modeling elucidate formation.