Researchers Take a Look at Traits People Perceive in Facial Features
If bald isn’t beautiful, at least it makes a man appear intelligent. But bearded men beware: your whiskers may tell strangers you’re not so nice.
Those are some recent findings of psychologists who study the judgments people make when they see a strange face.
Since at least Aristotle, observers have speculated that faces reveal the inner woman and man. But now researchers say they are making headway into just what it is people read into others’ looks.
“There’s some predictability in the judgments people make based on appearances,” said Diane Berry, an associate professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
A study by psychologist Michael Wogalter, formerly of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, found that beards make men seem older, less attractive and less sociable than their clean-shorn counterparts.
Wogalter, an assistant professor of psychology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, said he didn’t know why facial hair was viewed unfavorably, according to his research.
But he noted that beards must have a big impact on perceptions because “hair is the most salient feature of the face.”
Or lack of hair. The same study, in which Wogalter asked people to render their impressions of computer-generated mug shots, found that balding men were perceived as smarter and a little older.
A bit of extra good news for bald men is that the presence of cranial hair had no apparent effect on how viewers rated relative attractiveness.
Other studies have found that people with large eyes tend to be seen as warm and honest. But, then, big-eyed people also give the impression of being naive and submissive, researchers say.
Caroline Keating of Colgate University sees a pattern in all this.
She has a theory that certain male features, such as receding hairlines, may have evolved to attract mates. To this day, she said, such mature features are viewed as commanding because they imply age and status.
Other researchers have suggested that beards were worn by our ancestors to look threatening. Because facial hair increases the apparent mass of the lower face, it may have helped our forefathers to intimidate each other while also attracting mates.
“I think, by and large, we like males who look powerful and dominant, not naive and submissive,” Keating said.
But while mature features may make men more desirable to the opposite sex, Keating said, that’s not so true for women.
“As anybody’s grandmother can tell you, I suppose, age in males does not confer the disadvantages it does in females,” she said.
Round cheeks, big eyes, full lips and other “baby-like” features are generally viewed as attractive in women, according to Keating. Notably, women in Western societies wear makeup to accentuate those attributes.
Many scientists, however, dismiss the belief that character traits can be divined through faces.
Alvin Goldstein, a psychologist now retired from the faculty at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who studied facial recognition for decades, said there’s no good evidence that character can be divined by looking at faces.
“It’s folklore,” he said, dismissingly.
Arguing against such skeptics, Berry at SMU cited studies that show people can distinguish criminals from non-criminals based on photographs, and have even matched the faces of criminals to the types of crimes they committed.
Her own research has found that people can infer character traits of people based on photos to a degree better than chance.
“There are significant and fairly substantial relationships between judgments made of strangers based on their face and their actual personality,” Berry said.
Among her theories to explain these phenomena is a belief in the notion that character and personality write themselves into the lines on the face.
“If you smile a lot, or if you’re angry a lot,” Berry said, “there’s a kind of residual effect, which means you end up with a different wrinkle pattern that actually communicates to people what your actual expressive style is.”
