Inferring Competence From Facial Appearance

Faces play a very important role in our life.They carry a large amount of information that we need to obtain in social activities that even affect people’s judgment and decision-making on individuals.When we do not know any other information about a stranger,we can judge whether he is trustworthy,attractive,or threatening just from his facial appearance.Competence trait is rather important in many social characteristics.And it is one of the traits that political and economic leaders must possess.Therefore,it has important significance to research the evaluation of competence from facial appearance in politics,management,economics and other related fields.From the perspective of Chinese special political system and culture,this research explores whether people can also judge competence from facial appearance.The research including four studies.And the three studies are as follows:Study1: Produce a face database for facial competence studies.There is no face database that is suitable for the evaluation of competence trait in China.Competence trait is required on politicians and entrepreneurs.In order to explore whether there is a difference in competence trait of the two identity groups and other occupational groups,the group with other professional status needs to be used as a reference.Therefore,it was the first step to collecting the pictures of faces of politicians,entrepreneurs and citizens.Then the collection of pictures was standardized such as image alignment,color,clipping,size and brightness unified.Inferring competence from unfamiliar facial appearance which was made in Study1.Participants were asked to judge competence from the images on a scale from1(not at all competent)to 9(extremely competent).The results showed that the politicians and entrepreneurs showed significantly higher levels of competence than the citizens.It was suggest that we can judge competence from an unfamiliar person on his face..Study2: The aim of this study is to explore the influence of external features of faces on the evaluation of competence trait.Most of previous researches on competence used retained external features of face image materials.In others,face materials have been used to remove external features.So there are some differences in the two materials.Therefore,it is necessary to explore whether the external features of the face will have a significant effect on the evaluation of competence.The process is the same as Study2.The results show that there is no significant difference in competence scores of the three identity type pictures between the external feature group and no external feature group.It obviously express that the external features of the face did not have a significant effect on the evaluation of competence.In other words,only the internal features of the face were sufficient to represent the whole faces.Study3: According to the competence trait to select candidates for a job.First,Pairing three types of pictures with only internal features in Study1.Then,there were two contextin the political and the business to select individuals who were more capable for politicians and entrepreneurs positions in the pair of pictures.Participants could accurately select politicians and entrepreneurs from the perspective of competence trait to be more suitable for their position than the citizens.That is,the characteristics of competence are not the same in the two different occupational groups: politicians and entrepreneurs.However,there are some overlapping places between politicians’ faces and entrepreneurs’ faces.