Trait judgments of faces using a task without word labels

People reliably attribute psychological traits to faces. Prior research typically elicits these judgments using specific words provided by the experimenter (e.g., ratings on “competent,” “trustworthy”). This dependency raises questions about validity (judgments in real life are seldom prompted by explicit labels), completeness (tasks typically use a limited set of words), and generalizability (e.g., across languages). Here we asked 1,751 participants to spatially arrange unfamiliar faces based on perceived trait similarity, without providing any word labels. We identified five dimensions that accounted for 76% of the variance, which we interpret as stereotypes associated with threat-approachability, gender-specific warmth, competence, morality, and youthfulness. Detailed comparisons with four other datasets corroborated these interpretations. Our findings reveal two novel dimensions by which people spontaneously make social evaluations when unconstrained by word labels, confirm prior dimensions of warmth and competence, and reiterate the importance of gender and age in social stereotypes.