Journal article 271 views 52 downloads
Testing perceivers’ accuracy and accuracy awareness when forming personality impressions from faces
Bastian Jaeger 
,
Willem WA Sleegers,
Julia Stern,
Lars Penke,
Alex Jones
,
Willem WA Sleegers,
Julia Stern,
Lars Penke,
Alex Jones
European Journal of Personality
Swansea University Author:
Alex Jones
-
PDF | Version of Record
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Download (1.14MB)
DOI (Published version): 10.1177/08902070231225728
Abstract
People spontaneously judge others’ personality based on their facial appearance and these impressions guide many important decisions. Although the consequences of personality impressions are well documented, studies on the accuracy of personality impressions have yielded mixed results. Moreover, rel...
| Published in: | European Journal of Personality |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 0890-2070 1099-0984 |
| Published: |
SAGE Publications
2024
|
| Online Access: |
Check full text
|
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa66043 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Abstract: |
People spontaneously judge others’ personality based on their facial appearance and these impressions guide many important decisions. Although the consequences of personality impressions are well documented, studies on the accuracy of personality impressions have yielded mixed results. Moreover, relatively little is known about people’s accuracy awareness (i.e., whether they are aware of their judgment accuracy). Even if accuracy is generally low, awareness of accuracy would allow people to rely on their impressions in the right situations. In two studies (one preregistered), we estimated perceivers’ accuracy and accuracy awareness when forming personality impressions based on facial photographs. Our studies have three crucial advantages as compared to previous studies (a) by incentivizing accuracy and accuracy awareness, (b) by relying on substantially larger samples of raters (nStudy 1 = 223, nStudy 2 = 423) and targets (kStudy 1 = 140, kStudy 2 = 1,260 unique pairs with 280 unique targets), and (c) by conducting Bayesian analyses to also quantify evidence for the null hypothesis. Our findings suggest that face-based personality impressions are not accurate, that perceivers lack insight into their (in)accuracy, and that most people overestimate their accuracy. |
|---|---|
| Keywords: |
Personality impressions, face perception, accuracy, accuracy awareness, confidence |
| College: |
Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences |
| Funders: |
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. |