In light of many recent articles touting people’s judgmental abilities, Olivola and Princeton University’s Friederike Funk and Alexander Todorov say that a careful look at the data really doesn’t support these claims. And “instead of applauding our ability to make inferences about social characteristics from facial appearances,” Olivola said, “the focus should be on the dangers.”
“When we see someone’s face, we can make a lot of useful judgments,” he said, “like about age, emotional state, gender, et cetera. For this, the face is pretty useful. But there’s a pretty rich literature showing that we don’t just stop there.”
Social attributions from faces alone tend to be constructed from how common facial features are within a culture, cross-cultural norms, and idiosyncrasies like resemblance to friends, colleagues, loved ones, and, importantly, ourselves.
“The fact that social decisions are influenced by facial morphology would be less troubling if it were a strong and reliable indicator of people’s underlying traits,” the researchers write in today’s article. “Unfortunately, careful consideration of the evidence suggests that it is not.”
The primary problem is that people feel they have this sense, and they ignore other relevant information, Olivola said.
This article was originally published on www.theatlantic.com. Read the complete article here.
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*Image of “man“ via Shutterstock
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