Children as young as three tend to judge an individual's character traits, such as trustworthiness and competence, simply by looking at the person's face, according to a new research.
The research, led by psychological scientist Emily Cogsdill of Harvard University, showed that the predisposition to judge others based on physical features starts early in childhood and does not require years of social experience.
Prior research has shown that adults regularly use faces to make judgments about the character traits of others, even with only a brief glance.
But it's unclear whether this tendency is one that slowly builds as a result of life experiences or is instead a more fundamental impulse that emerges early in life.
"If adult-child agreement in face-to-trait inferences emerges gradually across development, one might infer that these inferences require prolonged social experience to reach an adultlike state," Cogsdill and colleagues said.
"If instead young children's inferences are like those of adults, this would indicate that face-to-trait character inferences are a fundamental social cognitive capacity that emerges early in life," they said.
To explore these ideas, the researchers had 99 adults and 141 children (ages 3 to 10) evaluate pairs of computer-generated faces that differed on one of three traits: trustworthiness (ie, mean/nice), dominance (ie, strong/not strong), and competence (ie, smart/not smart).
After being shown a pair of faces, participants might be asked, for example, to judge "which one of the people is very nice."
As expected, the adults showed consensus on the traits they attributed to specific faces. And so did the children.
Children ages 3-4 were only slightly less consistent in their assessments than were 7-year-olds. But the older children's judgments were in as much agreement as adults', indicating a possible developmental trend.
Overall, children seemed to be most consistent in judging trustworthiness, compared to the other two traits. This suggests that children may tend to pay particular attention to the demeanour of a face - that is, whether it is broadly positive or negative.
The findings do not address the question of whether the judgments the children are making are accurate inferences of character, researchers said.
Rather, they simply demonstrated that adults and children are consistent in the traits they attribute to faces, irrespective of the validity of those judgments.
The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
