The Social Perception of the Big Five personality on the basis of facial photographs with neutral expression and self-esteem of the judged individual. International Journal of Multidisciplinary Thought
Abstract
The facial features elicit some personality attributions-social stereotypes. The “self-fulfilling prophecy” model states that we have a tendency to act in a way to fulfil other people’s expectation and this mechanism can play a role in the development of the relationship between facial morphology and personality.
Present study tested the possibility if the judgement of lower level of pro-social Big five characteristics, based on facial photographs with neutral expression, is related to lower level of self-esteem of judged individual. We hypothesized that self-esteem can play a role as a mediator in the process of acceptation or rejection these social stereotypes.
Additionally, we tested the influence of the facial attractiveness, masculinity and babyfacedness on ratings of the Big Five characteristics. We found that facial attractiveness increased the scores for judgements of pro-social characteristics (extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience) and decreased the judgement of neuroticism of both sexes.
On the other hand, facial masculinity decreased the judgements all Big Five personality characteristics in case of female targets and for conscientiousness and agreeableness in case of male targets. Babyfacedness increased attribution of extraversion in case of women´s photographs rated by female raters only.
Finally, we found the negative correlation between self-esteem and rated consciousness of men by female judges. Our results indicated that we cannot confirm our hypothesis that self-esteem is a mediator which can influence the acceptation of Big Five personality attributions on the base of facial morphology alone.