Modern Physiognomy: An Investigation on Predicting Personality Traits and Intelligence from the Human Face

TL;DR

This study investigates the potential of predicting personality traits and intelligence from facial images using machine learning, finding some traits can be reliably classified but overall prediction of scores remains challenging.

Contribution

It introduces a combined facial structural and appearance feature approach for trait prediction and explores the predictability of personality and intelligence from faces and fingerprints.

Findings

Rule-consciousness and Vigilance can be reliably predicted

Female facial traits are predicted more accurately than males

Predicting intelligence from facial features is difficult

Abstract

The human behavior of evaluating other individuals with respect to their personality traits and intelligence by evaluating their faces plays a crucial role in human relations. These trait judgments might influence important social outcomes in our lives such as elections and court sentences. Previous studies have reported that human can make valid inferences for at least four personality traits. In addition, some studies have demonstrated that facial trait evaluation can be learned using machine learning methods accurately. In this work, we experimentally explore whether self-reported personality traits and intelligence can be predicted reliably from a facial image. More specifically, the prediction problem is separately cast in two parts: a classification task and a regression task. A facial structural feature is constructed from the relations among facial salient points, and an appearance feature is built by five texture descriptors. In addition, a minutia-based fingerprint feature from a fingerprint image is also explored. The classification results show that the personality traits "Rule-consciousness" and "Vigilance" can be predicted reliably, and that the traits of females can be predicted more accurately than those of male. However, the regression experiments show that it is difficult to predict scores for individual personality traits and intelligence. The residual plots and the correlation results indicate no evident linear correlation between the measured scores and the predicted scores. Both the classification and the regression results reveal that "Rule-consciousness" and "Tension" can be reliably predicted from the facial features, while "Social boldness" gets the worst prediction results. The experiments results show that it is difficult to predict intelligence from either the facial features or the fingerprint feature, a finding that is in agreement with previous studies.