Using deep learning to predict users' superficial judgments of human faces

Many psychology studies have confirmed the biased nature of human judgments and decision-making. When interacting with a new person, for instance, humans often make a series of automatic and superficial judgments based solely on their appearance, facial features, ethnicity, body-type, and body language. Researchers at Researchers at Princeton University, Stevens Institute of Technology, and the Booth School of Business of the University of Chicago have recently tried to predict some of the automatic inferences that humans make about others based solely on their face, using deep neural networks. Their paper, published in PNAS, introduces a machine learning model that can predict the arbitrary judgments users will make about specific pictures of faces with remarkable accuracy. "As psychologists, we are interested in how people perceive and judge faces, especially when there are important consequences, such as hiring and sentencing decisions involved," Joshua Peterson, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore "However, most work up to now was limited to studying artificial 3D face renderings or small sets of photographs."