Results from the two-factor PCA show that aggressiveness, one of the potential global factors for the finer-grained personality trait judgments, loads quite strongly on the first component, whereas the other two, masculinity/femininity and gender, load quite strongly on the second component. Inspection of the communalities column in
Table 1 reveals that the potential global factors attractiveness, masculinity/femininity, and gender share only 54–66% of the total variance, whereas the six personality traits share 70–92 % of the total variance. It can be concluded, therefore, that the potential global factors do not play an important role in the judgment process. The finer-grained personality trait judgments cannot be explained by a spontaneous global impression formed on the basis of either attractiveness (beauty-is-good-stereotype, see e.g., Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo,
1991), masculinity/femininity, or gender (e.g., Hoffman & Hurst,
1990) of the individual. Subjects make differentiated social judgments about individuals, even if the only information available is facial appearance. An explanation for the negligible role of the faces' gender and for the overall lack of gender stereotyping could be that subjects might not have gender categorized the faces. Subjects rating the personality traits were not explicitly asked to make gender categorizations. The absence of extra-facial features may be the reason why subjects did not spontaneously gender categorize the faces. Even though adult subjects are able to gender categorize adult faces without non-facial gender cues (Cheng, O'Toole, & Abdi,
2001; Rossion,
2002; Wild et al.,
2000), there is evidence that they do not categorize if they are not explicitly asked to do so (Martin & Macrae,
2007). Other candidates for global impressions such as pose, facial expression, or gaze direction were held constant in our face database and thus did not contribute variance to our data.