First Impressions of Faces

What is it about?

Participants rated faces on trustworthiness, status, and attractiveness following 33, 100, and 500 ms masked presentation. The face images used were naturalistic, highly variable images (similar to those people upload onto Facebook) and, also, youthful-looking averaged faces.

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Why is it important?

We found that people can evaluate faces on trustworthiness, status, and attractiveness following even just a brief glance at a face (e.g., 33 ms) and extra time (100 or 500 ms) only led to a small improvement in the correspondence of these time-constrained evaluations with an independent set of time-unconstrained judgments. Facial judgments are consequential, for instance, predicting government election results and influencing romantic preferences. The increasing prevalence of online images and internet-based relationships make these findings timely and important.