An empirical article by Leigh Ann Vaughn and 152 other researchers around the world was published on January 4 in Nature Human Behavior. The lead researchers were Benedict Jones (University of Glasgow), Lisa DeBruine (University of Glasgow), Jessica Flake (McGill University), Christopher Chartier (Ashland University), and Nicholas Coles (Harvard University).
Professor Vaughn and her undergraduate research team enjoyed this project. She developed the IRB proposal for Ithaca College, managed data collection here, and helped write the paper. Her research team student recruited participants, helped trouble-shoot the Ithaca College laboratory procedure, and collected data for the project. The project asked participants to rate the personality traits they saw in various faces. Over 11,000 people at over 100 institutions on every inhabited continent participated.
The major finding was cross-cultural support for the tendency for people to see two main dimensions in others’ faces: perceived trustworthiness (i.e., valence) and perceived ability to inflict harm on the viewer (i.e., dominance).