Multimodal person evaluation: First impressions from faces, voices, and names.

Abstract

We form a first impression every time we meet someone unfamiliar to us. When this happens, we often have access to information about this person's appearance, voice and the first thing we learn about them is usually their name. Despite this, much of what we know about social evaluation processes has been almost exclusively based on facial information. Here, approximately 45,000 spontaneous first impression descriptors were sampled to identify the most common judgments we make when presented with information about someone's face, voice, and name at the same time as well as when presented with information about their voice or name only. Ratings of these most common traits were then collected, and exploratory factor analysis was used to establish the underlying structure of multimodal, voice-, and name-based first impressions. Consistent with facial impression models, the two underlying dimensions of social evaluation, approachability and competence, emerged consistently regardless of the degree or type of identity information available, further adding to the existing evidence for their universal nature. Additional independent dimensions capturing confidence and pretentiousness were also found for multimodal impressions. These more social aspects of first impressions highlight further cultural learning routes to impression formation in addition to the evolutionary ones that have been the sole focus of existing work based on unimodal impressions from faces. Such findings draw attention to the need to further understand the mechanisms behind first impressions from different identity cues and, more importantly, how these cues are integrated together to form person first impressions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).