People readily attribute many traits to faces: some look beautiful, some competent, some aggressive1. These snap judgments have important consequences in real life, ranging from success in political elections to decisions in courtroom sentencing2,3. Modern psychological theories argue that the hundreds of different words people use to describe others from their faces are well captured by only two or three dimensions, such as valence and dominance4, a highly influential framework that has been the basis for numerous studies in social and developmental psychology5–10, social neuroscience11,12, and in engineering applications13,14. However, all prior work has used only a small number of words (12 to 18) to derive underlying dimensions, limiting conclusions to date. Here we employed deep neural networks to select a comprehensive set of 100 words that are representative of the trait words people use to describe faces, and to select a set of 100 faces. In two large-scale, preregistered studies we asked participants to rate the 100 faces on the 100 words (obtaining 2,850,000 ratings from 1,710 participants), and discovered a novel set of four psychological dimensions that best explain trait judgments of faces: warmth, competence, femininity, and youth. We reproduced these four dimensions across different regions around the world, in both aggregated and individual-level data. These results provide a new and most comprehensive characterization of face judgments, and reconcile prior work on face perception with work in social cognition15 and personality psychology16.
A PSYCHO-LEXICAL STUDY OF PERSONALITY TRAIT WORDS
