Abstract
Despite the difficulty of inferring the personality traits and abilities of other persons from facial appearance, some people hold the belief that various traits can be inferenced from the face (i.e., physiognomic beliefs). In fact, facial appearance is known to impact on moral judgments. However, it is unclear how facial appearance influences moral judgments and how the observer’s physiognomic beliefs affect this process. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of the observer’s physiognomic beliefs on the face stereotypes concerning the acts associated with moral violations. In the experiment, multiple images were generated by applying random noises to the average face, and face stereotypes of the immoral-related acts were estimated using the noise-based reverse correlation method. The results showed that the degree of the observer’s physiognomic beliefs does not affect the face stereotypes of immoral-related acts.
