Face Value: The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions

FIGURE 8.3. The photographer Cindy Sherman uses her own face to create different impressions.

“the face of an enemy thus makes a thousand other faces ugly to us, just as the face of a loved one in contrast spreads its appeal to a thousand others.”

Consequently, we could not manipulate faces on trustworthiness without changing their expressions. It took me a second to realize that this was the coolest finding I have had in my lab so far. Emotional expressions naturally emerged in the model of impressions of trustworthiness!

But the model is showing that to form impressions of trustworthiness, participants were relying on the similarity, however subtle, of the faces to emotional expressions. Faces

In 1977, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson published a famous but back then controversial paper “Telling more than we can know.” Their main argument was that we have no introspective access to the cognitive processes that produce our judgments. We are, of course, aware of the products of these judgments but

straight from the face to the essence of the face bearer, but they miss the crucial fact that what we see in the face are our own impressions.

You see ten pairs of pictures of politicians who ran for the U.S. Senate, and you have to decide who looks more competent.