Comprehensive trait attributions show that face impressions are organized in four dimensions

How do people form impressions of others based on faces? Existing psychological theories argue that people attribute traits to others from faces along two or three dimensions. While these theories have now been incorporated into numerous empirical and theoretical studies, they were derived from a small set of trait attributions, which limits their generalizability and leaves the true nature of the psychological dimensions unclear. The present study applied deep neural networks to representatively sample an inclusive list of traits and faces, generating a comprehensive set of 100 traits and 100 faces that we administered in two large-scale preregistered studies. These comprehensive trait attributions (Study 1, 750,000 ratings) revealed a novel four-dimensional space: warmth, competence, female-stereotype, and youth-stereotype, challenging existing theories. Study 2 collecting dense individual-level data in seven different countries (2,100,000 trials) reproduced this four-dimensional space across cultures and in individual participants. These findings, together with test-retest reliability of all trait attributions and direct comparisons with existing theories, provide a new, most comprehensive characterization of trait attributions from faces.