Testing perceivers’ accuracy and accuracy awareness when forming personality impressions from faces

Abstract

People spontaneously judge others’ personality based on their facial appearance and these impressions guide many important decisions. Although the consequences of personality impressions are well documented, studies on the accuracy of personality impressions have yielded mixed results. Moreover, relatively little is known about people’s accuracy awareness (i.e., whether they are aware of their judgment accuracy). Even if accuracy is generally low, awareness of accuracy would allow people to rely on their impressions in the right situations. In two studies (one preregistered), we estimated perceivers’ accuracy and accuracy awareness when forming personality impressions based on facial photographs. Our studies have three crucial advantages as compared to previous studies (a) by incentivizing accuracy and accuracy awareness, (b) by relying on substantially larger samples of raters ( n Study 1 = 223, n Study 2 = 423) and targets ( k Study 1 = 140, k Study 2 = 1,260 unique pairs with 280 unique targets), and (c) by conducting Bayesian analyses to also quantify evidence for the null hypothesis. Our findings suggest that face-based personality impressions are not accurate, that perceivers lack insight into their (in)accuracy, and that most people overestimate their accuracy.