Integrating social and facial models of person perception: Converging and diverging dimensions.
Models of first impressions from faces have consistently found two underlying dimensions of trustworthiness and dominance. These dimensions show apparent parallels to social psychological models of inter-group perception that describe dimensions of warmth (cf. trustworthiness) and competence (cf. dominance), and it has been suggested that they reflect universal dimensions of social cognition. We investigated whether the dimensions from face and inter-group social perception models are indeed equivalent by evaluating first impressions of faces. Across four studies with differing methods we consistently found that while perceptions of trustworthiness and warmth were closely related, perceptions of dominance and competence were less strongly related. Taken together, our results demonstrate strong similarity on the first dimension across facial and social models, with less similarity on the second dimension. We suggest that facial impressions of competence and dominance may represent different routes to judging a stranger's capability to help or harm.
Department of Psychology, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK; ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Crawley 6009, WA, Australia. Electronic address: clare.sutherland@uwa.edu.au.
Clare A M
CAM
Sutherland
Psychological Science and Statistics, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn 3122, VIC, Australia.
Julian A
JA
Oldmeadow
Department of Psychology, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK.
Andrew W
AW
Young
D000328:Adult; D005149:Facial Expression; D000066499:Facial Recognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012930:Social Dominance; D012938:Social Perception; D035502:Trust; D055815:Young Adult
Face perception; First impressions; Person perception; Social cognition