Humans spontaneously attribute character traits to strangers based on their facial appearance. Although these ‘first impressions’ typically have no basis in reality, some authors have assumed that they have an innate origin. By contrast, the Trait Inference Mapping (TIM) account proposes that first impressions are products of culturally acquired associative mappings that allow activation to spread from representations of facial appearance to representations of trait profiles. According to TIM, cultural instruments, including propaganda, illustrated storybooks, art and iconography, ritual, film, and TV, expose many individuals within a community to common sources of correlated face–trait experience, yielding first impressions that are shared by many, but typically inaccurate. Here, we review emerging empirical findings, many of which accord with TIM, and argue that future work must distinguish first impressions based on invariant facial features (e.g., shape) from those based on facial behaviours (e.g., expressions).

人类会根据陌生人的容貌自发地将性格特征归因于陌生人。尽管这些“第一印象”通常在现实中没有根据，但一些作者认为它们具有与生俱来的起源。相比之下，特征推断映射 (TIM) 帐户提出，第一印象是文化获得的关联映射的产物，它允许激活从面部外观的表示传播到特征轮廓的表示。据 TIM 称，文化工具，包括宣传、插图故事书、艺术和肖像、仪式、电影和电视，使社区内的许多人接触到相关面部特征经验的共同来源，产生许多人共享的第一印​​象，但通常不准确。在这里，我们回顾了新兴的实证研究结果，