How old was he? Disguises, age, and race impact upon age estimation accuracy

Abstract

Summary There are many situations in which a person must accurately estimate a stranger's age. For example, a salesperson must accurately estimate the age of a stranger who wishes to purchase age‐restricted goods. Information from a stranger's eyes and hair can indicate their likely age. Here, two experiments examined whether adult participants' accuracy when estimating strangers' ages is reduced when the strangers' eyes are disguised by sunglasses and/or hair is disguised by a hat. The strangers' age and race also varied, and participants' social contact with the other age/race groups measured. At best, estimations of undisguised strangers' ages were inaccurate by an average of 5.10 years. Accuracy decreased when the strangers' eyes, but not hair, were disguised and when they came from other age/race groups. Accuracy when estimating other age/race group members' ages and social contact with their members were unrelated. The theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed.

Are estimates of faces’ ages less accurate when they wear sunglasses or face masks and do these disguises make it harder to later recognise the faces when undisguised?

“…Studies similar to ours have also shown estimates of undisguised young adults' ages are inaccurate by an average that is close to 5 years (e.g. Short et al, 2019;Thorley, 2021;Voelkle et al, 2012). Additionally, we replicated Thorley's (2021) past result showing participants continue overestimating young adults' ages when they are wearing sunglasses.…”

“…All faces in this study belonged to young adults as we wished to test the replicability of Thorley's (2021) previous finding showing estimates of their ages are no less accurate when they are pictured wearing sunglasses. His finding could be considered surprising, given that the eye region contains important information about a face's age.…”

“…Additionally, Voelkle et al found that age estimates are prone to an own-age bias, meaning estimates of unfamiliar faces' ages are most accurate when the faces come from our own-age group (see also George & Hole, 1995;Klugman, 1947;Moyse & Brédart, 2012). Thorley (2021) recently examined whether estimates of unfamiliar faces' ages are less accurate when their eye region is disguised by sunglasses. To do this, he had young adults estimate the age of 20-85-year-olds who were wearing no disguise or sunglasses.…”

Your ID, please? The effect of facemasks and makeup on perceptions of age of young adult female faces

“…Other group characteristics may also account for some of the variance recorded in the present study, namely gender and ethnicity of stimulus and participants. Although these characteristics have not been extensively documented, existing findings suggest that Caucasian participants perform better when evaluating Caucasian faces (Dehon & Brédart, 2001; Thorley, 2021), but this own‐ethnicity bias does not persist for African participants (Dehon & Brédart, 2001). Few studies have examined own‐gender bias in age estimation from faces, and those which have did not find evidence to support this (Dehon & Brédart, 2001; Voelkle et al, 2012).…”

“…Only a small set of studies have examined the effect of obscuring different facial features on age perception. In those studies, obscuring head shape and hair did not decrease accuracy (George & Hole, 1995), but obscuring the eye region led to a greater reduction in accuracy compared to disguising the hair and forehead or no disguise at all (Thorley, 2021). Furthermore, a recent eye‐tracking study suggests that the central triangle (collectively eyes, nose, and mouth) may be important for age estimation (Liao et al, 2020).…”