Inferring social attributes from different face regions: Evidence for holistic processing

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the role that different face regions play in a variety of social judgements that are commonly made from facial appearance (sex, age, distinctiveness, attractiveness, approachability, trustworthiness, and intelligence). These judgements lie along a continuum from those with a clear physical basis and high consequent accuracy (sex, age) to judgements that can achieve a degree of consensus between observers despite having little known validity (intelligence, trustworthiness). Results from Experiment 1 indicated that the face's internal features (eyes, nose, and mouth) provide information that is more useful for social inferences than the external features (hair, face shape, ears, and chin), especially when judging traits such as approachability and trustworthiness. Experiment 2 investigated how judgement agreement was affected when the upper head, eye, nose, or mouth regions were presented in isolation or when these regions were obscured. A different pattern of results emerged for different characteristics, indicating that different types of facial information are used in the various judgements. Moreover, the informativeness of a particular region/feature depends on whether it is presented alone or in the context of the whole face. These findings provide evidence for the importance of holistic processing in making social attributions from facial appearance.

Keywords:

• Face perception
• Social judgements
• Holistic processing
• Facial features

Acknowledgments

The first author was supported by a doctoral grant from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal, and by a postdoctoral grant from the Economical and Social Research Council, UK. This work was carried out while the first author was at the University of York. We wish to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous version of the manuscript.