Social Judgments from Faces and Bodies

Abstract

Despite the primacy of the face in social perception research, people often base their impressions on whole persons (i.e., faces and bodies). Yet, perceptions of whole persons remain critically under-researched. We address this knowledge gap by testing the relative contributions of faces and bodies to various fundamental social judgments. Results show that faces and bodies contribute different amounts to particular social judgments on orthogonal axes of social perception: bodies primarily influence status and ability judgments whereas faces primarily influence warmth-related evaluations. One possible reason for this may be differences in signal that bodies and faces provide for judgments along these two axes. To test this, we extended our investigation to social judgment accuracy, given that signal is a precondition to accuracy. Focusing on one kind of status/ability judgment—impressions of social class standing—we found that perceivers can discern individuals’ social class standing from faces, bodies, and whole persons. Conditions that included bodies returned higher accuracy, indicating that bodies may contain more signal to individuals’ social class than faces do. Within bodies, shape cued social class more than details of individuals’ clothing. Altogether, these findings highlight the importance of the body for fully understanding processes and outcomes in person perception.