Emotional bias as wrong as it is: This is how we judge others by their faces | Health and wellness

Whatever you do, whatever you are, there will always be someone willing to judge your face. The First impressions They form in a tenth of a second. Prominent, competent, aggressive jaw. Big round eyes, slow, naive, unintelligent. We all do this unconsciously, but some people draw quicker and more accurate inferences from facial features than others, according to a study by a group of Japanese researchers published by the Royal Society.

Abraham Lincoln is credited with one of the most famous joint posts on the subject. They say that he was looking for someone for his government and rejected the candidate with the only argument: “I don’t like his face.” One of his advisors tried to make him see that this person was not responsible for his face, but Lincoln disagreed: “Any human being over the age of forty has the face he deserves.”

No one gets away with believing their first impressions are the most accurate, but there are those who don’t even allow themselves to doubt it. The study The November Japanese publication ensures that some people have a very pronounced tendency to quickly judge others based on their facial features. These people are usually extreme in their judgments, whether positive or negative. According to this research, in a job interview, your skills can be judged in a tenth of a second from, say, the definition of your jaw, a circumstance that, barring surgical intervention, is usually determined more by genetics than by. by will.

Fast and extreme

Both thoughtful and impulsive individuals are subject to these biases. Our main findings were to show that those who make more extreme judgments about a person’s trustworthiness based on facial features also tend to draw quick conclusions about other characteristics such as competence,” wrote Atsunobu Suzuki, lead author of the investigation.

If these people hold a key position in a company, their decisions can change the lives of those they encounter and put their face as their first letter of identification. The researchers concluded that today there is an “exaggerated effect of Facial features in social decision-making processes.

“Our studies have shown that first impressions are determined by universal facial features—a multiple combination of facial features—rather than by regional or ethnic characteristics. For example, happy faces with a feminine appearance tend to be perceived as more trustworthy than stiff, mean faces. Masculine appearance,” explains Suzuki, adding that people draw their conclusions from the overall impression. Who face It is not specific features like the size of the nose or the thickness of the lips.

Although the study did not show that women are seen as less competent than men, Suzuki points out that a feminine face and appearance are seen as inept.

None of this applies to normative subjects, who are favored by the well-proven halo effect in other studies. “Attractive faces They are seen as desirable and usually the attributes of reliability and efficiency are immediately assigned to them,” the researcher explains.

Predictable and difficult to change

Psychologist Alexander Todorov, a professor at Princeton University, is one of the researchers who has investigated the most about the value of first impressions. He says these snap judgments are “expected” but are always wrong. Even worse, it ensures that those first impressions are hard to change.

In 2005 he published a Article in the journal Sciences He explained that it was possible to predict a large proportion of the election results using the quick judgments made on the faces of the candidates. Todorov laments that in the past ten years we have been witnessing a resurgence in physiological theories, namely those that assert that it is possible to read a person’s character or mood from their appearance.

in his book Face value: the irresistible impact of a first impression, Todorov sends a central message: Every day we record many first impressions and depend a great deal on them. He writes “These first impressions are not usually firm predictors of what will happen in the long run”. The psychologist points out that just as people and organizations are fully aware of discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or age, they are not fully aware of biases about facial appearance, regardless of race and gender. “There are similar distinctions based solely on facial features, and if we weren’t aware, these appearance biases would have an impact on people’s interactions in the real world,” he explains.

First impressions have a psychological function and help to understand what might be happening in the here and now. “The problem is when they are thought to be useful for revealing what a person looks like,” Todorov warns. In his book, he explains that in evolutionary history most of the time, humans had no need to use physical appearance To judge their fellow men: “Humans used to live in extended families and were never associated with more than 100 people. It was very easy to tell who it was.”

As we begin to live in modern nations where millions of strangers live together, a perceptual problem arises because there are no clues to what a stranger is like and the need for reliable evidence. “Facial features They have become that key that apparently unlocks all the mysteries, ”explains the professor.

From phrenology to selfie

In the book, Todorov acknowledges that trusting first impressions is comforting and practical, even when many mistakes are made. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, physiognomy became very popular because it was the time of the Great Industrial Migration, and for the first time large groups of strangers gathered in cities. Physiologists promise to quickly discover, at literally one glance, the social origin of each individual, his virtues and defects, his weaknesses and strengths.

In 1800 the German neuroanatomist Franz Joseph Gall developed the theory of phrenology, which Today it is considered pseudoscience. According to his axioms, it was possible to determine the character and character traits, including criminal inclinations, from the shape of the skull, head, and facial features. It was extremely popular in Victorian England in the nineteenth century, but it never caught on in academic circles.

If we are confident Appearance of And judging by the face is still very attractive in 2022, because in a world where interactions are fast and superficial, and often happen through a screen, the confusion is colossal. A poorly lit face framed by a phone or computer’s front-facing camera sends out a lot of misinformation, but we like to think that some clues will tip us over the other.

Which cannot be consoled, because you do not want to. “The face is a great social motivator, we want to give it meaning, because today we need evidence more than ever in our global societies full of strangers and strangers,” says Todorov. This student of first impressions writes in his book that he worries entirely on his own: “Especially if I have to make an important decision, I try very hard to minimize snap judgment based on someone else’s face.”

The study, conducted by Japanese researchers, calls for training company employees to identify unconscious biases, including snap judgments based on facial features. If it is not finished DiscriminationAt least some, he contends, will begin to doubt their first impressions.

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