Dominant models of impression formation focus on two fundamental dimensions: a horizontal dimension of warmth/communion/trustworthiness and a vertical dimension of competence/agency/dominance. However, these models have typically been studied using theory-driven methods and stimuli of restricted complexity. We used a data-driven approach and naturalistic stimuli to explore the latent dimensions underlying >300,000 unconstrained linguistic descriptions of 1,000 Facebook profile pictures from 2,188 participants. Via traditional (Exploratory Factor Analysis) and modern (natural language dictionaries, semantic sentence embeddings) approaches, we observed impressions to form with regard to the horizontal and vertical dimensions and their respective facets of sociability/morality and ability/assertiveness, plus the key demographic variables of gender, age, and race. However, we also observed impressions to form along numerous further dimensions, including adventurousness, conservatism, fitness, non-conformity, and stylishness. These results serve to emphasize the importance of high-dimensional models of impression formation and help to clarify the content dimensions underlying unconstrained descriptions of individuals.

Four experiments investigated the perceived virtue of curiosity about religion. Adults from the United States made moral judgments regarding targets who exhibited curiosity, possessed relevant knowledge, or lacked both curiosity and knowledge about religion and comparison topics (e.g., science). Participants attributed greater moral goodness to targets who displayed curiosity compared with targets who were ignorant or knowledgeable about the domain. This preference was consistent across Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, and other Christian participants but was absent when atheists evaluated religious curiosity. Perceptions of effort partially mediated judgments: Participants viewed curious characters as exerting more effort and consequently rated them as more moral. To test causality, we manipulated perceptions of effort and showed that participants viewed curious characters who exerted effort as particularly moral. This work fosters novel insights into the perceived virtue of curiosity and further illuminates similarities and differences between religious and scientific cognition.

Evolutionary biology provides a unifying theory for testing hypotheses about the relationship between hormones and person perception. Person perception usually receives attention from the perspective of sexual selection. However, because person perception is one trait in a suite regulated by hormones, univariate approaches are insufficient. In this Perspectives article, quantitative genetics is presented as an important but underutilized framework for testing evolutionary hypotheses within this literature. We note tacit assumptions within the current literature on psychiatric genetics, which imperil the interpretation of findings thus far. As regulators of a diverse manifold of traits, hormones mediate tradeoffs among an array of functions. Hormonal pleiotropy also provides the basis of correlational selection, a process whereby selection on one trait in a hormone-mediated suite generates selection on the others. This architecture provides the basis for conflicts between sexual and natural selection within hormone-mediated suites. Due to its role in person perception, psychiatric disorders, and reproductive physiology, the sex hormone estrogen is highlighted as an exemplar here. The implications of this framework for the evolution of person perception are discussed. Empirical quantification of selection on traits within hormone-mediated suites remains an important gap in this literature with great potential to illuminate the fundamental nature of psychiatric disorders.

Understanding others involves inferring traits and intentions, a process complicated by our reliance on stereotypes and generalized information when we lack personal information. Yet, as relationships are formed, we shift toward nuanced and individualized perceptions of others. This study addresses how relationship strength influences the creation of unique or normative representations of others in key regions known to be involved in social cognition. Employing a round-robin interpersonal perception paradigm (N = 111, 20 groups of five to six people), we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine whether the strength of social relationships modulated the degree to which multivoxel patterns of activity that represented a specific other were similar to a normative average of all others in the study. Behaviorally, stronger social relationships were associated with more normative trait endorsements. Neural findings reveal that closer relationships lead to more unique representations in the medial prefrontal cortex and anterior insula, areas associated with mentalizing and person perception. Conversely, more generalized representations emerge in posterior regions like the posterior cingulate cortex, indicating a complex interplay between individuated and generalized processing of social information in the brain. These findings suggest that cortical regions typically associated with social cognition may compute different kinds of information when representing the distinctiveness of others.

First impressions formed from facial appearance predict important social outcomes. Existing models of these impressions indicate they are underpinned by dimensions of Valence and Dominance, and are typically derived by applying data reduction methods to explicit ratings of faces for a range of traits. However, this approach is potentially problematic because the trait ratings may not fully capture the dimensions on which people spontaneously assess faces. Here, we used natural language processing to extract \'topics\' directly from participants\' free-text descriptions (i.e., their first impressions) of 2222 face images. Two topics emerged, reflecting first impressions related to positive emotional valence and warmth (Topic 1) and negative emotional valence and potential threat (Topic 2). Next, we investigated how these topics were related to Valence and Dominance components derived from explicit trait ratings. Collectively, these components explained only ~44% of the variance in the topics extracted from free-text descriptions and suggested that first impressions are underpinned by correlated valence dimensions that subsume the content of existing trait-rating-based models. Natural language offers a promising new avenue for understanding social cognition, and future work can examine the predictive utility of natural language and traditional data-driven models for impressions in varying social contexts.

Despite unresolved questions about replicability, a substantial number of studies find that disgust influences and arises from evaluations of immoral behavior and people. Departing from prior emphases, the current research examines a novel, related question: Are people who are viewed as disgusting (i.e., people whose habits seem disgusting) perceived as more immoral than typical or unusual people? Four experiments examined this, also exploring the downstream impacts of moral character judgments. Adults who seemed disgusting were regarded as more immoral for purity and non-purity violations (Experiment 1) and less praiseworthy for prosocial acts (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, an 8-year-old with typical (but seemingly disgusting) habits was rated as \"naughtier\" and likelier to misbehave than an atypical child who loved vegetables and disliked sweets. Experiment 4 revealed how, when no behavioral information is available, beliefs about target disgust influence beliefs about future behavior, helping explain why seemingly disgusting targets are viewed as more immoral, but not always more punishable for their bad behavior.

Although the effects of counterstereotypic individuating information (i.e., information specific to individual members of stereotyped groups that disconfirms the group stereotype) on biases in explicit person perception are well-established, research shows mixed effects of such information on implicit person perception. The present research tested the overarching hypothesis that, when social group membership is perceived to be under an individual\'s control, diagnostic individuating information would have lesser effects on implicit person perception than it would when social group membership is perceived not to be under an individual\'s control. This hypothesis was tested in the domain of implicit attitudinal and stereotype-relevant judgments of individuals who belonged to existing social groups and individuals who belonged to novel social groups. We found that individuating information consistently shifted scores on implicit measures among targets belonging to existing social groups, but not in a theoretically predicted direction among targets belonging to novel social groups. Controllability of group membership did not moderate such effects. Results of implicit and explicit measures were mostly consistent when targets belonged to existing social groups, but mostly inconsistent when targets belonged to novel social groups.

Evaluating other people\'s moral character is a crucial social cognitive task. However, the cognitive processes by which people seek out, prioritize, and integrate multiple pieces of character-relevant information have not been studied empirically. The first aim of this research was to examine which character traits are considered most important when forming an impression of a person\'s overall moral character. The second aim was to understand how differing levels of trait expression affect overall character judgments. Four preregistered studies and one supplemental study (total N = 720), using five different measures of importance and sampling undergraduates, online workers, and community members, found that our participants placed the most importance on the traits honest, helpful, compassionate, loyal, and responsible. Also, when integrating the information that they have learned, our participants seemed to engage in a simple averaging process in which all available, relevant information is combined in a linear fashion to form an overall evaluation of moral character. This research provides new insights into the cognitive processes by which evaluations of moral character are formed.

Faces and bodies are processed in separate but adjacent regions in the primate visual cortex. Yet, the functional significance of dividing the whole person into areas dedicated to its face and body components and their neighboring locations remains unknown. Here we hypothesized that this separation and proximity together with a normalization mechanism generate clutter-tolerant representations of the face, body, and whole person when presented in complex multi-category scenes. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a fMRI study, presenting images of a person within a multi-category scene to human male and female participants and assessed the contribution of each component to the response to the scene. Our results revealed a clutter-tolerant representation of the whole person in areas selective for both faces and bodies, typically located at the border between the two category-selective regions. Regions exclusively selective for faces or bodies demonstrated clutter-tolerant representations of their preferred category, corroborating earlier findings. Thus, the adjacent locations of face- and body-selective areas enable a hardwired machinery for decluttering of the whole person, without the need for a dedicated population of person-selective neurons. This distinct yet proximal functional organization of category-selective brain regions enhances the representation of the socially significant whole person, along with its face and body components, within multi-category scenes.

People are drawn to and like others who are physically attractive. In the present research, we investigated the influence of trait self-control on individuals\' interest in relationships with physically attractive others. We hypothesized that high (vs. low) self-control individuals would approach relationships by considering information beyond appearance about potential partners, including partners\' self-control. We additionally explored the influence of other traits (e.g., Big 5, self-esteem, and attachment styles) on relationship interest. Across studies, we consistently found that individuals with higher self-control avoided pursuing relationships with attractive individuals who display low self-control. In Study 3, we observed a similar pattern for three other traits: conscientiousness, extraversion, and positivity embracement. These results suggest perceivers\' self-control shapes relationship interest, particularly when attractive individuals possess less desirable qualities. The findings extend past research that attractiveness increases interest in others and highlights the potential for trait self-control to direct relationship interest during initial interactions.