Personality and Appearance

Charles Darwin once applied to be the ‘energetic’ partner that Robert Fitzroy, the Beagle’s captain, sought, but was all but rejected for one of his woeful yet absolutely obvious flaws: his nose. Fitzroy was a great believer in physiognomy, which claims that you can tell a person’s character by his or her appearance. As Darwin’s daughter Henrietta later recalled, Fitzroy was convinced that ‘a person with such a nose would not have the energy’. But this was not always the case. Fortunately, Darwin’s other facial features made up for his flat nose – his eyebrows came to his rescue.

The idea that a person’s character can be glimpsed in their face dates back to the ancient Greeks. In the late 18th century, the Swiss poet Johann Lavater popularised this idea, making it a hot intellectual topic. In Darwin’s day, it was somewhat taken for granted by the public. Only after becoming associated with the infamous phrenology of the late 19th century was physiognomy written off as pseudoscience.

First impressions are highly influential, despite the well-worn admonition not to judge a book by its cover. Within a tenth of a second of seeing an unfamiliar face, we have already made a judgement about its owner’s character – caring, trustworthy, aggressive, extrovert, competent and so on. Once that snap judgement has formed, it is surprisingly hard to budge. Such snap judgements can also have an impact on people’s behaviour. Politicians with com-petent-looking faces have a greater chance of being elected, and CEOs who look dominant are more likely to run a profitable company. There is also a widely acknowledged ‘attrac-tiveness halo’. People seen as good-looking not only get the most valentines but are also judged to be more outgoing, socially competent, powerful, intelligent and healthy.

In 1966, psychologists at the University of Michigan carried out a study in which 84 under-graduates, total strangers to each other, rated one another on five personality traits based solely on their appearance, as they sat there for 15 minutes in sheer silence. Their judge-ments over such traits as extroversion, conscientiousness and openness matched real per-sonality scores significantly more often than chance. Lately, researchers, notably Anthony Little of the University of Stirling and David Perret of the University of St Andrews, have looked into the link between appearance and personality again. They pointed out that the Michigan studies failed to exert tight control over the confounding factors. However, when Little and Perrett reran this experiment, this time using mugshots instead of real subjects, they also noticed a connection between facial appearance and personality – though only for extroversion and conscientiousness. Little and Perrett claimed that they only found a corre-lation at the extremes of personality.

Justin Carre and Cheryl McCormick of Brock University in Ontario, Canada, examined 90 ice hockey players. They found that a wider face in which the cheekbone-to-cheekbone distance was unusually large relative to the distance between eyebrows and upper lip was linked in a statistically significant way with the number of penalty minutes a player was given for violent acts including slashing, elbowing, checking from behind and fighting. The kernel of truth idea isn’t the only explanation on offer for our readiness to make facial judgements. According to Leslie Zebrowitz, a psychologist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, snap judgements in many cases are not accurate. The snap judgement, more often than not, is nothing but an ‘overgeneralisation’ of a more basic response, she says. A typical example of overgeneralisation can be seen in the predators’ response to eyespots, the distinct circular markings on some moths, butterflies, and fish. These eyespots might end up terrorising the predators in that they resemble the eyes of other creatures considered threats by the would-be predators.

Another researcher who leans towards overgeneralisation is Alexander Todorov. With Princeton colleague Nikolaas Oosterhof, he recently put forward a theory which he says explains our snap judgements of faces in terms of how threatening they appear. Todorov and Oosterhof asked people about their instinctive responses to pictures of emotionally neutral faces, sorted out all the responses, and narrowed them down to two fundamental factors: how reliable or dominant the face looks. Todorov and Oosterhof thus came to their conclusion that by making personal-ity judgements on the basis of people’s facial appearance, we are actually overgeneralising our ability to tell emotions from expressions as well as our ability to detect malignity and dangers from others. Todorov, however, stresses that overgeneralisation does not rule out the idea that there is sometimes a kernel of truth in these assessments of personality.

So where does the kernel of truth, if it does have one, come from? Perret believes that the connection is established when our biases about faces evolve themselves into self-fulfilling expectations, just as was investigated by other researchers back in 1977. Our expectations can lead us to influence people to behave in ways that confirm those expectations: con-sistently treat someone as untrustworthy and they end up behaving that way. Yet, in some cases, this effect could also wind up working the opposite way, especially among those with a cute look. Konrad Lorenz, the Nobel prize-winning ethologist, once commented that baby-faced looks were likely to invite nurturing responses. This viewpoint has been substanti-ated by works of Zebrowitz, who found out that baby-faced boys and men provide similar stimuli to the amygdala, an emotional centre of the brain. But beware: the whole theory could be taking an unexpected twist here. As a matter of fact, the chance is pretty high that baby-faced men turn out better-educated, more assertive, and more apt to win military medals than other mature-looking men. They are also more likely to be criminals; think of Al Capone. Similarly, Zebrowitz found baby-faced boys to be quarrelsome and hostile, and more likely to be academic high-fliers. She calls this the ‘self-defeating prophecy effect’: a man with a baby face strives to confound expectations and ends up overcompensating.

Another theory reminds people of the old parental warning in which parents caution children against pulling their own faces in case faces freeze that way. According to this theory, our personality moulds the way our faces look. It is supported by a study two decades ago which found that angry older people tend to look cross even when asked to make a neutral facial expression. A lifetime of scowling, grumpiness and grimaces seemed to have left its mark.

Questions 27 – 31

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer given in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 27–31 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about it

27.Robert Fitzroy’s first impression of Darwin was accurate.
28.The precise rules of ‘physiognomy’ have remained unchanged since the 18th century.
29.The first impression of a person can be modified later with little effort.

TRUEFALSENOT GIVEN

30.People who appear capable are more likely to be chosen to a position of power.
31.It is unfair for good-looking people to be better treated in society.

Questions 32 – 36

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 32–36 on your answer sheet.

32.Which one of the following is TRUE about Anthony Little and David Perrett’s experiment?
33.What can be concluded from Justin Carre and Cheryl McCormick’s experiment?
34.What is exemplified by referring to butterfly marks?
35.What is the aim of Alexander Todorov’s study?
36.What is the conclusion of Alexander Todorov’s study?

Questions 37 – 40

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A–F, below.

Write the correct letter, A–F, in boxes 37–40 on your answer sheet.

A judge other people by overgeneralisation.

B may influence the behaviour of other people.

C tend to commit criminal acts.

D may be influenced by the low expectations of other people.

E may show the effect of long-term behaviours.

F may be trying to repel the expectations of other people.