Originally published by Rita Handrich .
Unfortunately, this isn’t just some goofy research that we can make fun of and not take seriously. It is an example of the way we quickly look for shortcuts to assess character and personality traits. We all do it. And further, the consequences for the individual being judged are measurable and can be positive or negative. We know, for example, that attractive people get many benefits for simply being attractive. Apparently, we also have stereotypes about who appears trustworthy and who appears competent. We can take a glance at a face and make many assumptions. The problem is that our assumptions may be very wrong and it is very difficult to change first impressions.
The paper that forms the basis of this blog post was written to summarize the work on “facial morphological traits” and how they are linked to various social outcomes. While the early “science” of physiognomy (a system for identifying personality types and even criminality based on facial characteristics) has long been debunked, we still use many of the same sorts of shortcuts to make assumptions about each other. The research has shown many disturbing (and yet not hard to believe) results.
Politicians who possess particular facial characteristics (e.g., those viewed as reflecting competence and sociability) are more likely to win elections.
CEOs with faces that appear competent are more likely to be hired by large successful companies, even though their performance is no better than less competent-looking fellow applicants.
If you are in the military, you are more likely to be promoted to higher rank if your face appears dominant.
Defendants who have certain facial characteristics (e.g., appearing trustworthy or “baby-faced”) are less likely to be convicted of a crime than their peers who lack those characteristics.
There are multiple other findings that are clear examples of how you look being linked to social outcomes. The authors comment that there is causal evidence (not just correlational) showing facial appearance as influential in voting, economic exchanges, and legal judgments. We leap from facial appearance to character judgments of trustworthiness, competence, introversion, and dominance.
From a litigation advocacy perspective, this is obviously problematic if you have a deserving client who is not fortunate enough to have been born with the most acceptable facial characteristics. However, an intriguing fact is embedded in the article.
One study found that voters who have limited knowledge are more likely to vote for politicians with the most competent-looking faces. More knowledgeable voters showed no such tendency.
This bodes well for us. Educating jurors and finding likable things to show them about the client should mitigate first impressions. We often talk about the importance of using universal values in witness preparation and case narrative. The power of our stereotypes as we judge each other is shocking and illustrated clearly in the examples of trustworthy, extroverted, competent and dominant faces in the article itself. We need to pay attention to what we can do to reduce the biasing impact of facial appearance. The authors encourage awareness of just how challenging this goal will be:
“This is a challenging task because people are naturally inclined to draw inferences from faces to an extent that they may find it difficult to inhibit these tendencies. On the positive side, the evidence suggests that people sometimes rely on facial appearances less when they are armed with more relevant and valid types of information. Thus, in some contexts, educating people might be sufficient to reduce facial stereotyping. In other contexts, however, more research will be necessary to identify the best ways to mitigate the biasing influence of facial appearance. For instance, it still remains to be determined how justice can be truly blind – that is, how judges and juries can disentangle case-relevant facial information (e.g., expressions of remorse) from information that should be irrelevant to a case (e.g., facial morphological features perceived as criminal-looking).”
Olivola, C., Funk, F., & Todorov, A. (2014). Social attributions from faces bias human choices Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (11), 566-570 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2014.09.007
Image taken from article referenced above.
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