Social Psychological Face Perception: Why Appearance Matters

TLDR

First impressions from faces are formed rapidly and reliably, influencing social outcomes, and facial cues that signal low fitness, infancy, emotion, or identity are overgeneralized to people who resemble those categories. This review examines evidence for overgeneralization hypotheses and proposes future research that integrates ecological theory principles. The suggested research emphasizes dynamic, multimodal facial information, the reciprocal influence of behavior and perception, perceptual learning, and social goals that heighten sensitivity to specific facial cues.

Abstract

We form first impressions from faces despite warnings not to do so. Moreover, there is considerable agreement in our impressions, which carry significant social outcomes. Appearance matters because some facial qualities are so useful in guiding adaptive behavior that even a trace of those qualities can create an impression. Specifically, the qualities revealed by facial cues that characterize low fitness, babies, emotion, and identity are overgeneralized to people whose facial appearance resembles the unfit (anomalous face overgeneralization), babies (babyface overgeneralization), a particular emotion (emotion face overgeneralization), or a particular identity (familiar face overgeneralization). We review studies that support the overgeneralization hypotheses and recommend research that incorporates additional tenets of the ecological theory from which these hypotheses are derived: the contribution of dynamic and multi-modal stimulus information to face perception; bidirectional relationships between behavior and face perception; perceptual learning mechanisms and social goals that sensitize perceivers to particular information in faces.