Deep models of superficial face judgments
Open accessAbstract
Significance: We quickly and irresistibly form impressions of what other people are like based solely on how their faces look. These impressions have real-life consequences ranging from hiring decisions to sentencing decisions. We model and visualize the perceptual bases of facial impressions in the most comprehensive fashion to date, producing photorealistic models of 34 perceived social and physical attributes (e.g., trustworthiness and age). These models leverage and demonstrate the utility of deep learning in face evaluation, allowing for 1) generation of an infinite number of faces that vary along these perceived attribute dimensions, 2) manipulation of any face photograph along these dimensions, and 3) prediction of the impressions any face image may evoke in the general (mostly White, North American) population.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The choice of using intelligence, trustworthiness, sociability and happiness as dependent attributes for the halo effect was driven by existing literature.
“The choice of using intelligence, trustworthiness, sociability and happiness as dependent attributes for the halo effect was driven by existing literature on this cognitive bias, such as [4,6,8,9,22,53,60–63].”
From What is beautiful is still good: the attractiveness halo effect in the era of beauty filters (2024) · cites this paper as [62]
In Results, “The Structure of Attribute Inferences” (page unavailable), the paper analyzes ratings of smartness, trustworthiness, happiness, and outgoingness, which is close to sociability, and compares some findings with prior work. It does not describe these four attributes as dependent measures of a halo effect or say that literature on that bias motivated their selection. (LLM, conf=0.78)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks
Karras, T., Laine, S., & Aila, T. (2019) · 2019 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) · doi:10.1109/cvpr.2019.00453 · Cited by 11,714 · see citing works
StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-domain Image-to-Image Translation
Choi, Y., Choi, M., Kim, M., Ha, J.-W., Kim, S., & Choo, J. (2018) · 2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · doi:10.1109/cvpr.2018.00916 · Cited by 4,163 · see citing works
AttGAN: Facial attribute editing by only changing what you want
He, Z., Zuo, W., Kan, M., Shan, S., & Chen, X. (2019) · IEEE Transactions on Image Processing · doi:10.1109/tip.2019.2916751 · Cited by 833 · see citing works
DeepFakes: a New Threat to Face Recognition? Assessment and Detection
Korshunov, P., & Marcel, S. (2018) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1812.08685 · Cited by 497 · see citing works
Almeida, D., Shmarko, K., & Lomas, E. (2022) · AI and Ethics · doi:10.1007/s43681-021-00077-w · Cited by 203 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 37
- [1]F. Farzin, C. Hou, A. M. Norcia, Piecing it together: Infants’ neural responses to face and object structure. J. Vis. 12, 6– 6 (2012). PMC3587016 23220577
- [2]N. Kanwisher, J. McDermott, M. M. Chun, The fusiform face area: A module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception. J. Neurosci. 17, 4302– 4311 (1997). 9151747 PMC6573547
- [3]C. Frith, Role of facial expressions in social interactions. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 364, 3453– 3458 (2009). 19884140 PMC2781887
- [4]N. N. Oosterhof, A. Todorov, The functional basis of face evaluation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 105, 11087– 11092 (2008). 18685089 PMC2516255
- [5]C. A. Sutherland., Social inferences from faces: Ambient images generate a three-dimensional model. Cognition 127, 105– 118 (2013). 23376296
- [6]L. A. Zebrowitz, First impressions from faces. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 26, 237– 242 (2017). 28630532 PMC5473630
- [7]B. C. Jones., To which world regions does the valence-dominance model of social perception apply? Nat. Hum. Behav. 5, 159– 169 (2021). 33398150
- [9]C. A. M. Sutherland., Facial first impressions across culture: Data-driven modeling of Chinese and British perceivers’ unconstrained facial impressions. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 44, 521– 537 (2018). 29226785
- [10]A. Todorov, C. Y. Olivola, R. Dotsch, P. Mende-Siedlecki, Social attributions from faces: Determinants, consequences, accuracy, and functional significance. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 66, 519– 545 (2015). 25196277
- [11]A. Todorov, A. N. Mandisodza, A. Goren, C. C. Hall, Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes. Science 308, 1623– 1626 (2005). 15947187
- [13]I. V. Blair, C. M. Judd, K. M. Chapleau, The influence of Afrocentric facial features in criminal sentencing. Psychol. Sci. 15, 674– 679 (2004). 15447638
- [14]J. L. Eberhardt, P. G. Davies, V. J. Purdie-Vaughns, S. L. Johnson, Looking deathworthy: Perceived stereotypicality of Black defendants predicts capital-sentencing outcomes. Psychol. Sci. 17, 383– 386 (2006). 16683924
- [15]C. J. Bohil, H. M. Kleider-Offutt, C. Killingsworth, A. M. Meacham, Training away face-type bias: Perception and decisions about emotional expression in stereotypically black faces. Psychol. Res. 85, 2727– 2741 (2021). 33074362
- [16]M. Turk, A. Pentland, Eigenfaces for recognition. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 3, 71– 86 (1991). 23964806
- [17]B. Tiddeman, M. Stirrat, D. Perrett, Towards realism in facial prototyping: Results of a wavelet mrf method. Proc. Theory Pract Comp. Graph. 1, 20– 30 (2006).
- [18]V. Blanz, T. Vetter, “A morphable model for the synthesis of 3d faces” in Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, A. Rockwood, Ed. (ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1999), pp. 187–194.
- [20]O. M. Parkhi, A. Vedaldi, A. Zisserman, “ Deep face recognition” in Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), X. Xi, M. W. Jones, G. K. L. Tam, Eds. (BMVA Press, 2015), pp. 41.1– 41.12.
- [22]T. Karras., “Analyzing and improving the image quality of StyleGAN” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (IEEE, 2020), pp. 8110–8119.
- [24]A. J. O’Toole, C. D. Castillo, C. J. Parde, M. Q. Hill, R. Chellappa, Face space representations in deep convolutional neural networks. Trends Cogn. Sci. 22, 794– 809 (2018). 30097304
- [26]P. Terhörst, D. Fährmann, N. Damer, F. Kirchbuchner, A. Kuijper, “Beyond identity: What information is stored in biometric face templates?” in 2020 IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB) (IEEE, 2020), pp. 1–10.
- [27]V. Bruce, A. Young, Understanding face recognition. Br. J. Psychol. 77, 305– 327 (1986). 3756376
- [28]D. Oh, R. Dotsch, J. Porter, A. Todorov, Gender biases in impressions from faces: Empirical studies and computational models. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 149, 323– 342 (2020). 31294585
- [29]J. R. Collova, C. A. M. Sutherland, G. Rhodes, Testing the functional basis of first impressions: Dimensions for children’s faces are not the same as for adults’ faces. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 117, 900– 924 (2019). 31169388
- [30]W. A. Bainbridge, P. Isola, A. Oliva, The intrinsic memorability of face photographs. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 142, 1323– 1334 (2013). 24246059
- [31]G. Rhodes, The evolutionary psychology of facial beauty. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 57, 199– 226 (2006). 16318594
- [32]C. P. Said, A. Todorov, A statistical model of facial attractiveness. Psychol. Sci. 22, 1183– 1190 (2011). 21852448
- [33]I. J. Goodfellow., “ Generative adversarial networks.” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Z. Ghahramani, M. Welling, C. Cortes, N. Lawrence, K. Q. Weinberger, Eds. (Curran Associates, Inc., 2014), vol. 27.
- [34]J. E. Martinez, F. Funk, A. Todorov, Quantifying idiosyncratic and shared contributions to judgment. Behav. Res. Methods 52, 1428– 1444 (2020). 31898288
- [36]C. J. Parde, Y. Hu, C. Castillo, S. Sankaranarayanan, A. J. O’Toole, Social trait information in deep convolutional neural networks trained for face identification. Cogn. Sci. 43, e12729 (2019). 31204800 PMC8735867
- [38]D. S. Ma, J. Correll, B. Wittenbrink, The Chicago face database: A free stimulus set of faces and norming data. Behav. Res. Methods 47, 1122– 1135 (2015). 25582810
- [39]A. Kiyonaga, J. M. Scimeca, D. P. Bliss, D. Whitney, Serial dependence across perception, attention, and memory. Trends Cogn. Sci. 21, 493– 497 (2017). 28549826 PMC5516910
- [41]D. Gragnaniello, D. Cozzolino, F. Marra, G. Poggi, L. Verdoliva, “Are GAN generated images easy to detect? A critical analysis of the state-of-the-art” in 2021 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) (IEEE, 2021), pp. 1–6.
- [42]G. Tang., Detection of GAN-synthesized image based on discrete wavelet transform. Secur. Commun. Netw. 2021, 5511435 (2021).
- [43]R. Winick, Intellectual property, defamation and the digital alteration of visual images. Columbia VLA J. Law Arts 21, 143 (1996).
- [44]L. B. A. Potter, Altered realities: The effect of digital imaging technology on libel and right of privacy. Hast. Comm. Ent. LJ 17, 495 (1994).
- [47]L. Litman, J. Robinson, T. Abberbock, TurkPrime.com: A versatile crowdsourcing data acquisition platform for the behavioral sciences. Behav. Res. Methods 49, 433– 442 (2017). 27071389 PMC5405057
- [48]A. Dosovitskiy, T. Brox, “ Generating images with perceptual similarity metrics based on deep networks” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, D. Lee, M. Sugiyama, U. Luxburg, I. Guyon, R. Garnett, Eds. (Curran Associates, Inc., 2016), pp. 658– 666.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
How human–AI feedback loops alter human perceptual, emotional and social judgements
Glickman, M., & Sharot, T. (2024) · Nature Human Behaviour · doi:10.1038/s41562-024-02077-2 · Cited by 289 · see citing works
What is beautiful is still good: the attractiveness halo effect in the era of beauty filters
Gulati, A., Martínez-Garcia, M., Fernández, D., Lozano, M. A., Lepri, B., & Oliver, N. (2024) · Royal Society Open Science · doi:10.1098/rsos.240882 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
- Authors
- Peterson, J. C., Uddenberg, S., Griffiths, T. L., Todorov, A., & Suchow, J. W.
- Affiliations
- Princeton University (US)
- University of Chicago (US)
- Stevens Institute of Technology (US)
- Corresponding author
- Peterson, Joshua C.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2022-04-21
- Volume
- 119
- Issue
- 17
- Pages
- e2115228119-e2115228119
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC9169911
- OpenAlex
- W4224222182
- Cited by
- 82
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 13 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 23 · 2023: 22 · 2022: 10
- FWCI
- 8.90
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Knowledge@UChicago (University of Chicago) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- University of Chicago
- Funders
- Princeton University (100006734)
- UChicago | University of Chicago Booth School of Business (100007618)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Face recognition and analysis
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Keywords
- face perception, deep generative models, trait inference, trustworthiness, age estimation, adiposity, synthetic face generation, inter-rater reliability
- MeSH terms
- Attitude, Face, Facial Expression, Humans, Judgment, Social Perception, Trust
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review