Nehaveigur

Observing someone, watching them smile or frown or hesitate or eat or walk, we can’t help form an opinion about them. Doing so may be an indispensable part of interacting with others. Even so, I’d love to know how accurate those opinions tend to be.

• How much information about someone’s personality is there in their appearance?
• Appearance is made up of different components, including their face, countenance, grooming, posture and how they move. How much information is in each of those?
• Does the typical person have a good grasp of how accurate their appearance-based personality predictions are, or are we normally overconfident?
• How much better are the very best appearance-based personality predictors compared to the average person? How much is this an acquirable skill?
• How good are we at predicting beyond the extremes of the distribution? It may be easier to predict if someone is in the top percentile of introversion based on their appearance than to distinguish between someone in the second and fourth quintile.
• Which personality traits are the easiest to predict based on appearance, and which the hardest?
• What’s more difficult: identifying people with extreme personality traits from appearance (avoiding false negatives) or making sure that we don’t mislabel someone as have an extreme personality trait (avoiding false positives)?
• How do the best human predictors compare to AI? Is there any good training data for AI beyond photos of faces?
• Which way does causality flow: Does someone’s personality cause their appearance, or does someone’s appearance influence their personality, or is there a third factor (e.g. testosterone levels) that influences both? If, as seems likely, it’s a combination of all three,  is any of them more important?
• How well can we predict things other than personality, like social status, intelligence, life expectancy and wealth from appearance?
• Is appearance-based personality prediction not just a form of prejudice? Should we try not to engage in it, even if this is difficult and unnatural?