Forming impressions of facial attractiveness is mandatory

Abstract

First impressions of social traits, such as attractiveness, from faces are often claimed to be made automatically, given their speed and reliability. However, speed of processing is only one aspect of automaticity. Here we address a further aspect, asking whether impression formation is mandatory. Mandatory formation requires that impressions are formed about social traits even when this is task-irrelevant, and that once formed, these impressions are difficult to inhibit. In two experiments, participants learned what new people looked like for the purpose of future identification, from sets of images high or low in attractiveness. They then rated middle-attractiveness images of each person, for attractiveness. Even though instructed to rate the specific images, not the people, their ratings were biased by the attractiveness of the learned images. A third control experiment, with participants rating names, demonstrated that participants in Experiments 1 and 2 were not simply rating the people, rather than the specific images as instructed. These results show that the formation of attractiveness impressions from faces is mandatory, thus broadening the evidence for automaticity of facial impressions. The mandatory formation of impressions is likely to have an important impact in real-world situations such as online dating sites.

Figure 1

Results of Experiment 2: attractiveness ratings of new face images (5 middle-attractiveness images of each identity); and Experiment 3: attractiveness ratings of each identity from only their name. Error bars denote standard error of the mean (SEM).

Figure 2

Example stimuli – five images showing the same identity. Stimuli were shown in full colour, and were unconstrained in terms of facial expression, lighting etc. Images in this figure are representative of the experimental stimuli and show an identity not used in the study who has given permission for her images to appear here.