Dyadic Person Similarity Predicts Similarity in Face Judgements

Perceivers consistently extract information from faces to judge whether others are attractive, trustworthy, or dominant. However, there is also substantial variability among perceivers when making these face-judgements. Here, we investigated whether dyadic similarities in participants’ personalities are related to similarities in their face-judgements. 307 participants based in the UK rated 24 faces on six traits. Participants also rated themselves on social-traits and completed a personality questionnaire. We computed dissimilarities between pairs of participants for face-judgements, self-perceived-traits, and personality-traits, resulting in three separate dissimilarity matrices. Using representational similarity analysis, we showed that both the self-perceived-trait and personality matrices were significantly correlated with the face-judgement matrix. Importantly, these associations were stable when controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, and location. These findings show that people who are more similar to each other also perceive others in a similar manner, and could form the basis for how we gravitate towards others and build friendships.