Can you tell if people are dangerous by looking at their face?

Slate's Dave Johns reports on the resurgence of the long-discredited pseudo-science of physiognomy ("infering personality traits from the face and body").

The new research suggests we are more skilled at "reading faces" than we knew. People are surprisingly adept at assessing sexual orientation from headshots. Five-year-olds can predict election outcomes based on photos of the candidates. We can even guess whether a face belongs to a Democrat or a Republican at a rate better than chance, according to a forthcoming study out of Princeton.

Now some of the "new physiognomists" are resurrecting an old claim: that you can gauge a man's penchant for aggression by the cut of his jib. Last fall University of California-Santa Barbara psychologist Aaron Sell reported that college students could accurately estimate the upper body strength of unfamiliar men after viewing their faces alone. (The men's necks were obscured.) The students did equally well with fellow undergraduates and men from South American indigenous groups--all of whom had had their strength measured using gym equipment. Interestingly, the toughest-looking undergrads also reported getting in the most fights. Another study by Sell suggests that such formidable men are more prone to use violence--or advocate military action--to resolve conflicts.

Many animals employ similar systems. Male orangutans grow fatty cheek pads that reflect group status. Lions with long, dark manes tend to rule the pride. From an evolutionary perspective, these advertisements may be a convenient way of saying, "Hey bro--btw, I can kick your ass" without having to go through the risk of combat.

Facial Profiling: Can you tell if a man is dangerous by the shape of his mug? (Phrenology poster from Bibliodyssey. "Signs of Character," Drawn and Published by R. Degranza Pease M.D. 1843)

• [LYNDON]

  If there’s anything in this – scars and missing teeth aside – it would be in how you habitually hold your face. I have an acting-type book (Keith Johnstone’s ‘Impro’) that talks about five or so basic expressions that people learn to use early on and that self-perpetuate.

  If you look confused all the time, someone will come and help you. But people will also conclude you’re stupid. And so on.

  I suspect you violent offenders generally look stay-away-from-me-I’m-trouble, which in the kind of background violent offenders come from counts as protective coloration.

  Of course, you have to watch out for the really smooth and friendly ones as well.

  • [Anonymous]

    Hmm, any chance you could enumerate those types just a bit? I’m interested as someone who tries valiantly to be warm and friendly, yet is constantly derided as a ‘snob’ — my operating theory to date has focused on vocabulary and opinion. If it’s ‘the cut of my jib’ instead, that would explain my difficulty to pin it down!

• [scifijazznik]

  Breaking News: People judge others based purely on looks.

  Seriously, you’d have to be a moron to look at a facial pics of Arnold Schwarzenegger and say, me, for example and not be able to guess who can bench more than whom.

  Also, go look at all the pictures of the men and women in the House and Senate. I dare you. Go on. It won’t hurt too much. But it’s pretty darn easy to guess who’s afraid to let a homosexual touch their hair.

  So while it may not be politically correct or socially polite to admit to judging people based on their face, we do it all the time. And I’d say most people do it pretty well. It would be a lot harder to find friends and mates if we didn’t. It’s how we found like-minded people before the internets, remember?

  • [Comatose51]

    While I agree that people do it all the time because they’re cognitive shortcuts, problems arise when we allow these first impressions be the last impressions and never give people a chance to be more than what we initially guessed them to be. First impressions can often be misleading because people often have different facets. However, first impressions also often prime us in how we interact with new people. Thus, an over-reliance on these initial impressions can create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    • [scifijazznik]

      I don’t disagree. I’m not saying it’s right or totally awesome that it’s what we do, just that we do it. Everyone does it.

      We mostly make friends with people we are attracted to, and one of the first cues we have to make the decision on whether or not to approach someone is visual. Does this person look friendly or not? Does this person look like someone I’d have things in common with or not? They maybe cognitive shortcuts, but why are shortcuts bad when there are so many people and so little time?

      I think it’s helpful, it’s evolutionary, and it involves both innate sensibilities and practice developed over your social lifetime. Sure, one bad incident with a guy whose eyes are too close together may lead you to stay away from an otherwise good person. But there are, no doubt, lots of others out there with close-together eyes who will find that person attractive because he looks like them.

      Self-fulfilling prophecy or not, better-looking people will always get preferential treatment because we’re a pretty superficial species, easily placated by Hannah Montana and space cash.

• [Anonymous]

  Of course, if someone is treated like a jerk for 10-20 years because of their looks, it might make them a bit combative and mean…self fulfilling prophecy.

• [Ian70]

  We do make judgments as to the character of a person before getting to know them, or instead of getting to know them. We prejudge. We -all- do it.

  The problem I have is that these folks are trying to justify this behaviour. That makes as much sense to me as trying to justify why people from certain backgrounds have beliefs like “Life after death” or “God.”

  Don’t justify behaviour by going to look for “kernels of truth”; if you go looking for something you may very well find it, but that doesn’t mean it was actually there.

  • [HereticGestalt]

    So, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like you’re saying that we should only investigate the origin, function, and nature of a belief or behavior if we agree with it, or think it’s a good thing.

    So the causes of criminal behavior, the cultural roots of authoritarian politics, the history or anthropology of virtually anything, etc. etc. are ruled out of bounds for you? Because, I mean, if studying the way humans heuristically infer non-physical traits from physical features is going to hurt society by encouraging us to be mean to one another, then studying the causes of criminal behavior, or a war, or, the turn to authoritarian politics, is certainly going to encourage those things as well – sort of like how violent video games turn kids into school shooters, and sex ed classes make people gay. And being soft on deviants and scoundrels like criminals and religious people for the sake of “knowledge” (pah!) is unacceptable.

    Have you ever even heard of academic objectivity?

• [weeklyrob]

  Just this morning, I read about a study published in the July-August edition of “Society.”

  They put sex offenders’ pics on hotornot and noticed that the average for the violent sex offenders was lower than that of the nonviolent sex offenders. In other words, violent sex offenders are likely to be uglier than nonviolent ones.

  They only used 24 pics, though, so it’s not exactly rigorous.

• [yri]

  I’m working on setting up a Reverse Phrenology practice, myself. Instead of merely predicting personality traits based on the shape on your head, this cutting-edge medical technique (pioneered on Discworld) actually induces desired new personality traits by changing the shape of your head with a hammer.

  • [SkullHyphy]

    LOL! Sign me up – people consistently misread me.

• [Karl Jones]

  Physiognomy, Phrenology and other pseudo-sciences are worse than useless. False positives lead you to distrust the harmless, while false negatives lead you to trust the dangerous.

  The only way to tell if people are truly dangerous (before they actually engage in dangerous behaviors) is by examining their brains.

  That’s why you should always insist on a cerebral autopsy before trusting anyone.

• [Doug Nelson]

  I have to wonder if they’re not confusing correlation with causality. Couldn’t it just as easily be that people that look a certain way tend to become Republican? Or ugly people have more sexual rage? Or testosterone affects both the face and the amount of agression?

  I remember a study some time back where they showed children pictures of assorted faces, and they tended to think of the more attractive faces as belonging to nicer people. So wouldn’t having people assume you’re nice tend to make you nicer (or more likely, having people assume you’re not nice make you less nice)?

  Regardless, it’s still all just a case of stereotypes built on a kernal of truth (even if that kernal might be vanishingly small).

  • [weeklyrob]

    I just pointed out the correlation and didn’t say anything about causation. Maybe I should have, because those researchers agree with you.

    Their guess was that ugly people tend to suffer more abuse and discrimination, leading to more violent tendencies from the sufferers. Just as you say.

    If I made it sound as though they claimed that ugly people are INNATELY more violent, then that’s my mistake.

• [Anonymous]

  Since I’ve got a fair sized sagittal crest, the ladies should be lining up to have my babies, eh? Eh?

  Well, not so much.

• [Anonymous]

  Liking “pretty” isn’t a matter of humans being a shallow species. Among humans and other species, symmetry is a sign of genetic rigor and good health- in short, someone who’s healthy and strong enough to either bring in more resources (better hunter, finder, etc.) or have healthy babies to build up the tribe/pack from the inside.

  Often lack of symmetry indicates disease (and thus some degree of damage) in utero or genetic errors at conception. This is an indication of poor genes or illness, and thus, is not as instinctively attractive as symmetry. In short- chicks dig good genes and so dudes with the mad genetic skilz get more sex and more offspring.

  As for “ugly = evil” Forensic psychiatrists who study the traits of violent criminals to find what “makes” a person scary and violent find three strong childhood indicators for future violence:
  1- Experiencing or witnessing violence (usually domestic) before age 4
  2- Family history of mental problems
  3- Brain damage or head trauma
  And Ted Bundy was known as being an unusually handsome and magnetic psycho.

  But I still feel that, just as we are hardwired for “pretty” there has to be a reason beyond “yuck! I don’t want YOUR genetic cooties!” behind the idea of criminal phenotyping. Maybe malnourishment or inbreeding (both known to cause behavioral problems) causes certain visual traits that we only viscerally acknowledge at this point?

• [Nadreck]

  Of course you can tell who are the bad guys just by looking at their faces: just look at any Dick Tracy strip!

  But seriously folks. While studying the lazy non-thinking that most people use to make instant, unchangeable judgements about others is a legitimate field of study its another thing entirely to mix up cause and effect here. If you’re ugly then you’ll always be treated like a criminal so you might as well be one. Just ask the FF’s first foe the Mole Man! And let’s not even get into Doc Doom….

  As noted above, some brain damages cause distinct head shapes and some of these kinds of brain damage cause proclivities towards violent behaviour. However you can’t really rely on it as many violent people look perfectly normal; brain damaged or not. There are some scanning behaviours that are red flags for psychopathy – the notorious shifty eyes – but the same caveat applies there.

  Then there’s the problem of racism. Many Asian people’s eye slits are too narrow to let you see the Whites of their Eyes so you can’t tell which way they’re looking. Hence no eye-contact is possible. Hence dumb White people with their big googly eyes, who are so enamoured of the local, recent fad of eye-contact that they’ve written it into their medical diagnostic manuals, think Orientals are Instrutable.

• [Felton]

  Can you tell if people are dangerous by looking at their face?

  What a ludicrous idea! The color of their hat is a dead giveaway, though.

• [Anonymous]

  Yes – easy. They’re ALL dangerous — they’re HUMANS!!!1!!

• [Teller]

  No doubt we’re attracted to beauty – however that’s personally defined. But pre-criminalizing by one’s mug – were this true, I’d be in Pelican Bay. In the SHU.

• [Brainspore]

  I just hope that security agencies don’t get a hold of this stuff and blow it out of proportion. If I was to guess I’d say this is about as “scientific” as the polygraph is for lie detection- a better indicator than chance alone, but not nearly good enough to be useful.

  • [scifijazznik]

    Exactly the point I failed to make in my bloviations on the topic. It’s one thing to make these sorts of judgments personally. But it’s so completely subjective that one should be very skeptical any scientific applications.

• [Anonymous]

  Years of being treated like you are X (based on arbitrary memes about what a person with the X attribute looks like) will quite often result in you behaving in a X fashion.

• [macemoneta]

  If you’re looking at a human, they’re dangerous. Remember our position in the food chain; we didn’t get there by being nice as a species – even to our own kind.

• [Anonymous]

  Well yah, looking at animals, I’m going to have to guess that if the mouth is big with sharp teeth, that animal will become a “predator”, and if it’s fuzzy, cute, and squeeks, it will be dressed in a pink sweater and get it’s fleas picked all day by my mom.

• [ill lich]

  I believe there is some scientific evidence that babies with fetal alcohol syndrome tend to have their eyes abnormally close together, AND develop mental disabilities that include a lack of cause-effect reasoning, that leads to behavior like theft. So in at least certain cases, thieves DO have their eyes closer together.

• [spencerluck]

  Given that most women, especially under 35, are insinctively attracted to narcissists, douchebags, abusers and charming sociopaths who will just run off and bang their sister in Tijuana, I’d say the face stuff doesn’t make much of a difference.

  All it takes is ego and Jupiter-sized, unjustifiable arrogance.

  This of course happens while they ignore otherwise great-guy nerds & geeks who are nervous around cute girls.

  They feel their mirror neurons fire, and just act on the subconscious/instinct without evaluating it rationally.

  So nervous geek == nervous girl. Relaxed, grinning sociopath douchebag == relaxed girl.

• [Anonymous]

  A week in Venice among the polyglot European tourists taught me about facial musculature. It became pretty easy to pick out a person’s native language just from looking at his or face. Best I could figure was that each language has a certain configuration of sounds that causes the facial muscles to develop in a certain way, different from all other languages.

  W/R/T personality traits, maybe it’s just a variant of what our mothers always told us. Yes, your face WILL stick that way.

• [gunnar11]

  One of my favorite quotes comes from phrenology – “note the sloping forehead and beetling brows denoting stupidity”.
  I’ll have to find a good physiognomy quote now.