ABSTRACT
Psychological research in person perception has established how judgments of people can be accurate based just on appearance. Under the ecological theory of social perception (Zebrowitz and Collins, 1997; Zebrowitz-McArthur and Baron, 1983), one’s physical appearance can act as an ‘affordance’ (Gibson, 1979), and perceivers can extract meaningful social signals from such affordances to draw accurate inferences about that person. In this model, a face serves a functional purpose for communicating social information, and perceivers may be attuned to detect and utilize such information. Relatedly, an evolutionary psychology perspective on person perception suggests that appearance is a function of biological mechanisms that also shape personality, and that humans adapt to become attuned to social cues relevant to their own survival and reproduction (Buss, 1999). Facial development is affected by many hormones that also alter personality and emotional development and behavioral characteristics (Neave et al., 2003) and, thus, humans may have evolved to extract meaningful social signals from faces (Perrett, 2010).
