  Facial appearance matters in social networks. Individuals frequently make
trait judgments from facial clues. Although these face-based impressions lack
the evidence to determine validity, they are of vital importance, because they
may relate to human network-based social behavior, such as seeking certain
individuals for help, advice, dating, and cooperation, and thus they may relate
to centrality in social networks. However, little to no work has investigated
the apparent facial traits that influence network centrality, despite the large
amount of research on attributions of the central position including
personality and behavior. In this paper, we examine whether perceived traits
based on facial appearance affect network centrality by exploring the initial
stage of social network formation in a first-year college residential area. We
took face photos of participants who are freshmen living in the same
residential area, and we asked them to nominate community members linking to
different networks. We then collected facial perception data by requiring other
participants to rate facial images for three main attributions: dominance,
trustworthiness, and attractiveness. Meanwhile, we proposed a framework to
discover how facial appearance affects social networks. Our results revealed
that perceived facial traits were correlated with the network centrality and
that they were indicative to predict the centrality of people in different
networks. Our findings provide psychological evidence regarding the interaction
between faces and network centrality. Our findings also offer insights in to a
combination of psychological and social network techniques, and they highlight
the function of facial bias in cuing and signaling social traits. To the best
of our knowledge, we are the first to explore the influence of facial
perception on centrality in social networks.
