Neuroscience
It takes just a tenth of a second for people to make judgements about you based on your facial appearance.
Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov asked university students to rate the attractiveness, likeability, competence, trustworthiness, and aggressiveness of actors’ faces after looking at their photos for just 100ms. The ratings they gave the faces correlated strongly with ratings given by other students who were allowed as long as they wanted to rate the faces. The strongest correlation was for trustworthiness. “Maybe as soon as a face is there, you know whether to trust it”, the researchers surmised.
As the time the students were given was increased up to half a second, or to a whole second, their ratings continued to correlate just as strongly with the ratings given by the students who were allowed as long as they wanted to rate the faces. However, with more time, the students’ ratings became slightly more negative and their confidence in their judgments increased.
“These findings suggest that minimal exposure to faces is sufficient for people to form trait impressions, and that additional exposure time can simply boost confidence in these impressions. That is, additional encounters with a person may only serve to justify quick, initial, on-line judgments”, the researchers said.
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Willis, J. & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions. Making up your mind after a 100-Ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17, 592-598.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Your trustworthiness is judged in a tenth of a second, or less
It takes just a tenth of a second for people to make judgements about you based on your facial appearance.Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov asked university students to rate the attractiveness, likeability, competence, trustworthiness, and aggressiveness of actors’ faces after looking at their photos for just 100ms. The ratings they gave the faces correlated strongly with ratings given by other students who were allowed as long as they wanted to rate the faces. The strongest correlation was for trustworthiness. “Maybe as soon as a face is there, you know whether to trust it”, the researchers surmised.
As the time the students were given was increased up to half a second, or to a whole second, their ratings continued to correlate just as strongly with the ratings given by the students who were allowed as long as they wanted to rate the faces. However, with more time, the students’ ratings became slightly more negative and their confidence in their judgments increased.
“These findings suggest that minimal exposure to faces is sufficient for people to form trait impressions, and that additional exposure time can simply boost confidence in these impressions. That is, additional encounters with a person may only serve to justify quick, initial, on-line judgments”, the researchers said.
__________________________________
Willis, J. & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions. Making up your mind after a 100-Ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17, 592-598.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- A Face That Could Get Away With Anything
First impressions lead to a multitude of assumptions, and trustworthiness is one of them: faces with v-shaped eyebrows and frowning mouths are consistently judged as less trustworthy than others with ^-shaped brows and mouths with upturned corners...
- What Your Walk Says About You ... Is Wrong
We garner a surprising amount of accurate information from the briefest glimpses of other people - their faces, voices and clothes. That much we know from past research. But what about the way they walk? Does a swagger betray an ego? A new study shows...
- Beauty: Symmetry Versus Averageness
It's a far cry from the almond eyes and radiant smiles of poetry, but according to psychology research, beauty lies, with some sterility, in the averageness and symmetry of a face. That much we know. The trouble is, studies on this topic have tended...
- You Hunky Smile Magnet
It seems beauty isn’t all in the eye of the beholder after all. Researchers have shown women rate a man as more attractive after they’ve seen another woman smiling at him. By contrast, being a jealous bunch, male observers rate a man as less attractive...
- Why Moving Faces Are Easier To Recognise
Psychologists have previously shown that moving faces are easier to recognise than a static image of a face. Karen Lander and Lewis Chuang at the University of Manchester sought to find out why. In a first experiment, 48 psychology students viewed degraded...