A Face to Love or Trust

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I enjoyed your paper. it is an important contribution to scholarship and the implications of scholarship in real life, which should be paramount in scholars' preoccupations and research activities.

Please check the quotations guidelines of the MDPI conglomerate and format the quotes accordingly.

Please proof-read the paper - or let a professional do it - and check for format consistency, eliminate all abbreviations and decide whether you write "Table", "Figure". "Appendix" etc. with capital letters at the beginning or not.

Consistency is key.

Please check the attached file for some improvement suggestions which are neither extensive nor exhaustive.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Thorough English proof-reading is necessary.  Otherwise, a lot of the paper contents gets lost.

Author Response

Thank you for such a positive and helpful review. The pdf file with the corrections was very useful and we have followed the advice and revised all the points.

Additional edits

Line 29 added information on “themselves”
    A third tentative hypothesis is that the participants will react more positively to images that contain facial information from themselves (see Methods).

Line 32 to line 35 has been added to address q2) the ingroup, and in what sense it was an ingroup.

Line 140 to 147 added as a reply to a reviewer question on norms and use of Jesus.

Line 456ff. ---- added to relate the general discussion about typicality and prototypicality, hinted at by both reviewers.

Are prototypes easy on the mind? We have demonstrated a typicality effect and that there is a difference between what is typical and what is proto-typical. The two terms might be confused. The prototypical is analogous to the central tendency in a population, and the more data we base the prototypes on, the less uncertainty, just like the standard error of the mean tends to be smaller in a large sample. The typical may have considerable variance, analogous to the uncertainty in data, or standard deviation, in a sample. The typical is common and familiar, and the prototypical is rare and valued. Faces have many dimensions. Thus, when we work with fewer dimensions, we project the data from different angles. However, there ought to be a way of separating what is typical, and what is proto-typical. The typical is a wide range of within normality, and the proto-typical is an abstraction. The typical in a sample contains the representative data points. The prototypes, in this article, are abstractions from a certain bias, such female and male prototypes. The human prototypes showed features of both male and female, and may thus be incongruent, which is one explanation why they were valued lower than especially female prototypes. Prototypes may have advantages [27], but it may be that we also use exemplars.

Reference to Winkielman et al. 2006 added.

Page breaks may have changed.

The four pictures of Christ has been identified, and added.

Reviewer 2 Report

The basic thrust of this research is to determine if the difference between judgments of beauty and trustworthiness is clear. The study methods are interesting and utilize facial generation software to test the researcher's assumptions. However, the study n is small, and the results demonstrate many difficulties in generalizing the internal mechanics of human judgments. Some additional clarification is needed, but the basic study contributes to this area. 

Several definitions of and explanations of processes need additional explanation. Please explain the following: 

1. What is meant by participants 'reacting more positively to images that involve themselves'? See here: "A third tentative hypothesis is that the participants will react more positively to images that involve themselves."

2. Define what you mean by "their own group." Is this visual similarity, cultural, or ethnic? A fourth tentative hypothesis is that participants react more positively to images that 30 contain portraits from the their own group rather than an unknown out-group. 

3. Define the difference between familiarity with self and a similar cultural or ethnic cohort. The methodology suggests that using the prototypical Jesus face is partially a cultural choice, but this is never discussed. The study makes many assumptions about what is normative for some groups of people. Still, it never explains why or how this is true and where there may be deviations in different populations or populations with high socio-cultural diversity. 

There are minor grammar mistakes throughout the document. 

Author Response

Thank you for such a positive and helpful review.  The suggested corrections were very useful and we have followed the advice and revised.


Additional edits

Line 29 added information on “themselves”
    A third tentative hypothesis is that the participants will react more positively to images that contain facial information from themselves (see Methods).

Line 32 to line 35 has been added to address q2) the ingroup, and in what sense it was an ingroup.

Line 140 to 147 added as a reply to the question on norms and use of Jesus.

Line 456ff. ---- added to relate the general discussion about typicality and prototypicality, hinted at by both reviewers.

Are prototypes easy on the mind? We have demonstrated a typicality effect and that there is a difference between what is typical and what is proto-typical. The two terms might be confused. The prototypical is analogous to the central tendency in a population, and the more data we base the prototypes on, the less uncertainty, just like the standard error of the mean tends to be smaller in a large sample. The typical may have considerable variance, analogous to the uncertainty in data, or standard deviation, in a sample. The typical is common and familiar, and the prototypical is rare and valued. Faces have many dimensions. Thus, when we work with fewer dimensions, we project the data from different angles. However, there ought to be a way of separating what is typical, and what is proto-typical. The typical is a wide range of within normality, and the proto-typical is an abstraction. The typical in a sample contains the representative data points. The prototypes, in this article, are abstractions from a certain bias, such female and male prototypes. The human prototypes showed features of both male and female, and may thus be incongruent, which is one explanation why they were valued lower than especially female prototypes. Prototypes may have advantages [27], but it may be that we also use exemplars.

Reference to Winkielman et al. 2006 added.

Page breaks may have changed.

The four pictures of Christ have been identified and added.