Face ethnicity influences which features drive social judgments

Humans regularly judge others’ character, including how trustworthy or dominant they are, based on facial appearance. Current models propose that specific facial features drive these judgments, but they are based predominantly on White faces. Here, we show that face ethnicity alters the features that drive trustworthiness and dominance judgments, highlighting the limited generalizability of current models. Using ethnically diverse faces and a powerful data-driven method, we modelled the 3D facial features that drive these key social trait judgments from Black African, East Asian, and White European faces in 60 individual White Western observers. Trustworthiness judgments are driven by a shared set of features plus those that exaggerate or diminish ethno-phenotypic features. Dominance judgments also rely on shared features plus those that exaggerate or diminish signal strength. Our results have direct implications for current theories of social perception and emphasize and the importance of representing ethnic diversity in psychological models.