The Janus face of risk taking: Understanding laypeople’s representations of risk taking from face impressions

Risk taking has often been associated with harmful behaviors, but recent work has emphasized the importance of understanding both its negative and positive facets. We aimed to contribute to this effort by mapping laypeople’s representations of risk taking using a novel approach that relies on examining impression formation of multiple personality and social dimensions from faces. The first two exploratory studies identified reliable facial correlates of perceived risk taking and revealed that impressions of risk taking show associations with impressions of positive (agency, extraversion) and negative traits (low conscientiousness, threat) and identified systematic differences as a function of the gender of target faces. Study 3 was a preregistered study aimed at predicting naïve participants’ impressions of risk taking in systematically modeled male and female faces. Study 3 suggests our new face models can be used to manipulate perceived levels of risk taking and that such manipulations can have an impact on the perceived valence of faces. All in all, our results suggest that laypeople’s conceptual representations of others’ risk taking are associated with both positive and negative components that can be understood and manipulated using face modeling.