The social perception of Big Five personality on the basis of facial photographs with neutral expression in relation to personality of judged individual
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 in order to fulfil other people's expectations of us and this mechanism can play a role in the development of the relationship between facial morphology and personality.
The present study tested the influence of the facial characteristics of attractiveness, masculinity, and baby-facedness on ratings of the Big Five characteristics (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness,and neuroticism) (Costa & Mcrae, 1992).We found that facial attractiveness increased the scores for judgements of pro-social characteristics (openness, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness) and decreased the judgement of neuroticism for 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. Baby-facedness increased attribution of extraversion in case of women's photographs, by female raters only.