SOCIAL DIMENSIONS IN SIMILARITY JUDGMENT OF FACES

Abstract

We spontaneously infer the social traits of people from their appearance. In the current study, the possibility that the perceived similarity of faces is based on perceived social traits, more specifically, evaluations on valence and power dimensions, was tested. Pilot studies provided the dissimilarity data of Japanese female faces with the similarity judgment task and validated them with a memory task. The current study demonstrated that two axes provided by multidimensional scaling analysis to the dissimilarity data could be interpreted in terms of valence and power dimensions. As participants were not explicitly asked to focus on social dimensions when rating the similarities of faces, the results suggested that participants automatically used social dimensions in the similarity judgment task. The present study suggests that the similarity of faces across social dimensions affects the perceived similarity of faces.