A Face to Love or Trust

Abstract

This article demonstrates the use of a card sorting game that is suitable for field studies. Subjective judgment in face perception is studied by sorting faces based on attractiveness or trustworthiness. Are beautiful people also trustworthy, or does beauty come with a price? Our first hypothesis is that the two conditions like and trust are different. We investigate this using a sorting game, where participants are asked to sort 27 semi-artificial portraits according to how much they like or trust the faces. The faces are in two different conditions: prototypes and individualized prototypes. Our participants were consistent in their judgments. Participants claim to have reacted to small inconsistencies in facial expressions in the trust condition, and we investigate the relation to anatomical features using a model and Correspondence Analysis.