The Chicago face database: a free stimulus set of faces and norming data
Open accessAbstract
Researchers studying a range of psychological phenomena (e.g., theory of mind, emotion, stereotyping and prejudice, interpersonal attraction, etc.) sometimes employ photographs of people as stimuli. In this paper, we introduce the Chicago Face Database, a free resource consisting of 158 high-resolution, standardized photographs of Black and White males and females between the ages of 18 and 40 years and extensive data about these targets. In Study 1, we report pre-testing of these faces, which includes both subjective norming data and objective physical measurements of the images included in the database. In Study 2 we surveyed psychology researchers to assess the suitability of these targets for research purposes and explored factors that were associated with researchers' judgments of suitability. Instructions are outlined for those interested in obtaining access to the stimulus set and accompanying ratings and measures.
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 [53]
The Contributions of the CFD section lists trustworthiness and happy expression among its face ratings, and the Results relate both ratings to experts’ judgments of face suitability (page numbers unavailable). The paper does not establish intelligence or sociability as attributes for a halo-effect study, or explain the citing authors’ choice of dependent attributes. (LLM, conf=0.82)
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
The fusiform face area: a module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception
Kanwisher, N., McDermott, J., & Chun, M. M. (1997) · The Journal of Neuroscience · doi:10.1523/jneurosci.17-11-04302.1997 · Cited by 7,738 · see citing works
Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes
Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.102.1.4 · Cited by 6,682 · see citing works
Baron‐Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., & Plumb, I. (2001) · Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry · doi:10.1111/1469-7610.00715 · Cited by 4,555 · see citing works
Neural network-based face detection
Rowley, H. A., Baluja, S., & Kanade, T. (1998) · IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1109/34.655647 · Cited by 3,554 · see citing works
Baron‐Cohen, S., Jolliffe, T., Mortimore, C., & Robertson, M. (1997) · Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry · doi:10.1111/j.1469-7610.1997.tb01599.x · Cited by 1,970 · see citing works
Fazio, R. H., Jackson, J. R., Dunton, B. C., & Williams, C. J. (1995) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.69.6.1013 · Cited by 1,793 · see citing works
Pashler, H., & Wagenmakers, E. (2012) · Perspectives on Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/1745691612465253 · Cited by 1,321 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 26
- Ackerman, J. M., Shapiro, J. R., Neuberg, S. L., Kenrick, D. T., Becker, D. V., Griskevicius, V., … Schaller, M. (2006). They all look the same to me (unless they're angry): From out-group homogeneity to out-group hetereogeneity. Psychological Science, 17(10), 836-840.
- Asendorpf, J. B., Conner, M., de Fruyt, F., de Houwer, J., Denissen, J. J. A., Fiedler, K., … Wicherts, J. M. (2013). Recommendations for increasing replicability in psychology. European Journal of Personality, 27, 108-119.
- Belhumeur, P. N., Hespanha, J. P., & Kriegman, D. J. (1997). Eigenfaces vs. fisherfaces: Recognition using class specific linear projection. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on, 19, 711-720.
- Berg, T. L., Berg, A. C., Edwards, J., Maire, M., White, R., Teh, Y. W., … Forsyth, D. A. (2004). Names and faces in the news. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2, 848- 854.
- Blair, I. V., & Judd, C. M. (2010). Afrocentric facial features and stereotyping. In R. B. Adams Jr., N. Ambady, K. Nakayama, & S. Shimojo (Eds.), The science of social vision. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Blair, I. V., Judd, C. M., & Fallman, J. L. (2004). The automaticity of race and Afrocentric facial features in social judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(6), 763-778.
- Bruce, V., & Young, A. (1986). Understanding face recognition. British Journal of Psychology, 77(3), 305-327.
- Carré, J. M., & McCormick, C. M. (2008). In your face: Facial metrics predict aggressive behaviour in the laboratory and in varsity and professional hockey players. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 275, 2651-2656.
- Correll, J., Park, B., Judd, C. M., & Wittenbrink, B. (2002). The police officer's dilemma: Using ethnicity to disambiguate potentially threatening individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6), 1314.
- Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1976). Pictures of facial affect. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
- Judd, C. M., & McClelland, G. H. (1998). Measurement. In D. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (4th ed., pp. 180-232). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
- Judd, C. M., Westerfall, J., & Kenny, D. A. (2012). Treating stimuli as a random factor in social pyshcology: A new and comprehensive solution to a pervasive but largely ignored problem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103, 54-69.
- Kenny, D. A., & Judd, C. M. (1996). A general procedure for the estimation of interdependence. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 138.
- Kumar, N., Belhumeur, P. N., & Nayar, S. K. (2008). FaceTracer: A search engine for large collections of images with faces. Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 340-353.
- Livingston, R. W., & Brewer, M. B. (2002). What are we really priming?: Cue-based versus category-based processing of facial stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 5-18.
- Ma, D. S., & Correll, J. (2011). Target prototypicality moderates racial bias in the decision to shoot. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 391-396.
- McConnell, A. R., & Leibold, J. M. (2001). Relations among the implicit association test, discriminatory behavior, and explicit measures of racial attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 37, 435-442.
- Morris, J. S., Friston, K. J., Büchel, C., Frith, C. D., Young, A. W., Calder, A. J., & Dolan, R. J. (1998). A neuromodulatory role for the human amygdala in processing emotional facial expressions. Brain, 121, 47-57.
- Morton, J., & Johnson, M. H. (1991). CONSPEC and CONLERN: A two-process theory of infant face recognition. Psychological Review, 98, 164.
- Pauker, K., & Ambady, N. (2009). Multiracial faces: How categorization affects memory at the boundaries of race. Journal of Social Issues, 65, 69-86.
- Rhodes, G., Proffitt, F., Grady, J. M., & Sumich, A. (1998). Facial symmetry and the perception of beauty. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5, 659-669.
- Sadler, M. S., Correll, J., Park, B., & Judd, C. M. (2012). The world is not black and white: Racial bias in the decision to shoot in a multiethnic context. Journal of Social Issues, 68, 286-313.
- Sato, W., & Yoshikawa, S. (2013). Recognition memory for faces and scenes. The Journal of General Psychology, 140, 1-15.
- Sergent, J., Ohta, S., & MacDonald, B. (1992). Functional neu- roanatomy of face and object processing A positron emission tomography study. Brain, 115(1), 15-36.
- Wells, G. L., & Windschitl, P. D. (1999). Stimulus sampling and social psychological experimentation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 1115-1125.
- Zebrowitz, L.A. (1997) Reading faces: Window to the soul? Westview Press.
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
Crowdsourcing hypothesis tests: Making transparent how design choices shape research results.
Landy, J. F., Jia, M. (., Ding, I. L., Viganola, D., Tierney, W., Dreber, A., Johannesson, M., Pfeiffer, T., Ebersole, C. R., Gronau, Q. F., et al. (2020) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/bul0000220 · Cited by 168 · see citing works
Higgins, I., Chang, L., Langston, V., Hassabis, D., Summerfield, C., Tsao, D., & Botvinick, M. (2021) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26751-5 · Cited by 162 · see citing works
Rating norms should be calculated from cumulative link mixed effects models
Taylor, J. E., Rousselet, G. A., Scheepers, C., & Sereno, S. C. (2022) · Behavior Research Methods · doi:10.3758/s13428-022-01814-7 · Cited by 126 · see citing works
“, 2014) or faces (Ma et al., 2015), and melodies (Belfi & Kacirek, 2021).”
Le Mau, T., Hoemann, K., Lyons, S. H., Fugate, J. M. B., Brown, E. N., Gendron, M., & Barrett, L. F. (2021) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-021-25352-6 · Cited by 74 · see citing works
Facing humanness: facial width-to-height ratio predicts ascriptions of humanity.
Deska, J. C., Lloyd, E. P., & Hugenberg, K. (2018) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/pspi0000110 · Cited by 71 · see citing works
Son, J.-Y., Bhandari, A., & FeldmanHall, O. (2019) · Scientific Reports · doi:10.1038/s41598-019-48050-2 · Cited by 37 · see citing works
Hughes, S. M., Aung, T., Harrison, M. A., LaFayette, J. N., & Gallup, G. G. (2021) · Archives of Sexual Behavior · doi:10.1007/s10508-020-01730-x · Cited by 33 · see citing works
Recognizing Human Races through Machine Learning—A Multi-Network, Multi-Features Study
Darabant, A. S., Borza, D., & Danescu, R. (2021) · Mathematics · doi:10.3390/math9020195 · Cited by 24 · see citing works
Do I Look Like a Criminal? Examining how Race Presentation Impacts Human Judgement of Recidivism
Mallari, K., Inkpen, K., Johns, P., Tan, S., Ramesh, D., & Kamar, E. (2020) · Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3313831.3376257 · Cited by 24 · see citing works
Encouraging pro-environmental behaviors through children-based appeals: a kin selection perspective
Palomo-Vélez, G., Buczny, J., & Van Vugt, M. (2020) · Sustainability · doi:10.3390/su12020748 · Cited by 23 · 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
Caution Ahead: Numerical Reasoning and Look‐Ahead Bias in AI Models
LEVY, B. (2026) · Journal of Accounting Research · doi:10.1111/1475-679x.70058 · Cited by 20 · see citing works
Testing vision is not testing for vision
Peli, E. (2020) · Translational Vision Science & Technology · doi:10.1167/tvst.9.13.32 · Cited by 14 · see citing works
Active disambiguation guides inferring controllability and cause in social interactions
Spiering, L., Trier, H. A., O’Reilly, J. X., Kolling, N., Wittmann, M. K., Rushworth, M. F. S., & Scholl, J. (2025) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-025-67853-8 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
- Authors
- Ma, D. S., Correll, J., & Wittenbrink, B.
- Affiliations
- California State University, Northridge (US)
- University of Colorado Boulder (US)
- University of Chicago (US)
- Corresponding author
- Ma, Debbie S.
- Venue
- Behavior Research Methods
- Published
- 2015-01-13
- Volume
- 47
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1122-1135
- ISSN
- 1554-351X (ISSN-L)
- 1554-3528
- OpenAlex
- W1964981411
- Cited by
- 1,788
- References
- 7
- Citations by year
- 2026: 182 · 2025: 238 · 2024: 219 · 2023: 206 · 2022: 209 · 2021: 216 · 2020: 196 · 2019: 134 · 2018: 100 · 2017: 54 · 2016: 25 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 1 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 36.66
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Behavior Research Methods (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- California State University ScholarWorks (system-wide DSpace) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (1226143)
- University of Chicago
- Booth School of Business, University of Chicago
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Face recognition and analysis
- Keywords
- face images, stimulus set, facial attractiveness, gender, age, theory of mind, emotions, interpersonal attraction
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Adult, Chicago, Emotions, Face, Female, Humans, Judgment, Male, Photic Stimulation, Prejudice, Reference Values, Stereotyping, Databases, Factual, Young Adult
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