Previous research demonstrates the visibility of social class from the face, as cued by differences in resting facial affect in neutral faces and differences in attractiveness in dating profile photos. This research, however, operationalized social class using only one measure: income. Social class standing consists of various related facets in addition to income, however, including education, occupational prestige, and subjective social class. It therefore remains unknown whether accurate perceptions of social class are specific to income, or whether the face reflects social class more generally. To address this gap, I tested the visibility of social class in two stimulus sets, standardized photos of Canadian undergraduates and yearbook photos of Icelandic secondary school graduates, each of which defined social class somewhat differently. Previous work on the visibility of social class from the face furthermore focused only on whether perceivers could distinguish those of higher class from those of lower class, leaving unclear whether greater nuance in social class standing might be detectable from the face. To explore this question, I used more detailed measures of targets’ social class and asked perceivers to make judgments along multi-point scales. Extant work moreover only demonstrates the visibility of social class background, but other research on predictive judgments from the face (e.g., career success) suggests that the face may hold hints of future class standing—I tested this possibility here. Finally, the current work tested whether the facial cues to social class were consistent across economic context, photo type, and time. My findings indicate that facial appearance reflects the underlying construct of social class (rather than just certain facets of class) and does so in a graded manner, with different degrees of social class standing discernable from the face. Across both stimulus sets, greater Positivity (affect and warmth) and Attractiveness (attractiveness, competence, and health) cued higher background social class standing, suggesting that social class impacts appearance similarly across economic contexts. The cues to future social class diverged from this, however. Overall, this work provides a clearer idea of the relationship between social class standing and facial appearance.Ph.D
