Judging personality traits of adolescents from photographs

Previous research has indicated that individuals can accurately judge certain personality dispositions of unacquainted peers after viewing facial photographs of them. The present investigation attempted to replicate and extend this finding. In Study 1, American high school seniors watched a videotape containing a series of facial photographs of twenty-two 14-year-old boys, and judged the social adjustment, good-worker attributes, and aggressiveness of each of these boys, using a series of bipolar scales. These impressions were then correlated with objective measures of these factors that had been taken previously. The subjects judged social adjustment, but not the other two factors, accurately. A second study evaluated the reliability of these findings. College students who were unacquainted with these boys rank-ordered them on the same three dimensions, using photographs of their upper bodies. The results of Study 2 were identical to those of Study 1, despite the differences in the judges' ages, the stimulus materials, and the methods of measurement.