People whose faces are perceived to look more "competent" are more likely to be CEOs of large, successful companies. Having a face that people deem "dominant" is a predictor of rank advancement in the military. People are more likely to invest money with people who look "trustworthy." These sorts of findings go on and on in recent studies that claim people can accurately guess a variety of personality traits and behavioral tendencies from portraits alone. The findings seem to elucidate either canny human intuition or absurd, misguided bias.

There has been a recent boom in research on how people attribute social characteristics to others based on the appearance of faces—independent of cues about age, gender, race, or ethnicity. (At least, as independent as possible.) The results seem to offer some intriguing insight, claiming that people are generally pretty good at predicting who is, for example, trustworthy, competent, introverted or extroverted, based entirely on facial structure. There is strong agreement across studies as to what facial attributes mean what to people, as illustrated in renderings throughout this article. But it's, predictably, not at all so simple.

Christopher Olivola, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, makes the case against face-ism today, in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 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."

By systematically altering or selecting the faces that participants are presented with, researchers have been able to examine how variations in facial appearance bias human decisions. These studies have shown not just correlations, but causal evidence that facial appearances influence voting, economic exchanges, and legal judgments. People tend to draw inferences about personality characteristics, above and beyond what we might assume based on things like gender, ethnicity, or expression. Social attributions from faces alone tend to be constructed from how common facial features are within a culture, cross-cultural norms (e.g., inferences on masculinity/femininity), and idiosyncrasies like resemblance to friends, colleagues, loved ones, and, importantly, ourselves. Olivola's research has shown that these facial attributions people make have serious implications for how people are treated, and their outcomes in life. The especially unfortunate part of these inferences is how heavily they factor into critical decisions, in lieu of actual facts.

"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. Politics is a great example. His research has shown that politicians whose facial structure is deemed to look more competent are more likely to win elections. (They use actual politicians in these studies. Fortunately for researches, Olivola noted, most Americans don't know who most congressional candidates are.) But that sense of competence in a face amounts to nothing. "We really can't make a statement on that," he said. "What's an objective measure of competence?"

---

---

In the case of CEOs, if you control for how the company was doing before they came on board versus after, there is really no relationship between their "facial competence" and the company's subsequent success. "People are convinced that more competent-looking businesspeople are more valuable, and they get higher salaries," Olivola explained, even though the companies don't perform any better under their leadership. "It's not accuracy in prediction; it's bias, actually."

Olivola has also done studies that show in conservative-leaning states, finding that the more "traditionally Republican" a person's face is deemed to look, the more votes he/she gets. Even if they're a Democrat. And the correlation between facial competence and vote share is strongest among voters who are lacking in political knowledge.