This project aims at investigating how personality trait judgments are formed on the basis of faces from two perspectives: First, we will focus on stimulus characteristics, that is, we will use a newly developed statistical face model to identify the physiognomic correlates of a wide range of personality trait judgments. Second, we will focus on judges’ characteristics and investigate different sources of inter-individual consensus and dissent in direct comparison.

By bringing together approaches and methods from social psychology and computer graphics and vision, we are able to investigate the processes of impression formation on the basis of facial features in a comprehensive way. This project will not only result in new findings regarding physiognomic correlates of personality trait judgments and inter-individual sources of consensus and dissent on social judgments, but also in more precise personality trait vectors that can be used in future research in different psychological fields, such as social cognition, social neuroscience, or the media psychology.