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Testing perceivers’ accuracy and accuracy awareness when forming personality impressions from faces

Bastian Jaeger Orcid Logo, Willem WA Sleegers, Julia Stern, Lars Penke, Alex Jones Orcid Logo

European Journal of Personality

Swansea University Author: Alex Jones Orcid Logo

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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...

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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
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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.

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