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Bad-boy looks are measurable – and do predict bad deeds, study concludes

Posted by Bridget in Biology, Life, Science in Society

Special to World Science

To some extent, you can assess a person’s trustworthiness from their looks, according to new research that could upset decades of settled scientific thinking.

In a study, Michael Haselhuhn and Elaine Wong of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found that men whose faces are relatively wide for their height are statistically more likely to act unethically.

Their finding, published in the 7 February issue of the research journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, follows another study that found such men are also statistically ‘more likely to exploit the trust of others.’ That work appeared in the March 2010 issue of the research journal Psychological Science.

‘Our results demonstrate that static [fixed] physical attributes can indeed serve as reliable cues of immoral action,’ Haselhuhn and Wong wrote, adding that their findings appear to apply to males only. ‘Perhaps some men truly are bad to the bone.’

The idea that physical traits are linked to a person’s character has a very controversial history, as it has become associated with racism at various times. In the 19th century a ‘science’ called phrenology gained popularity that purported to assess character and intellectual abilities based on skull shape; this field later fell into disrepute as some of its key tenets were found to be unreliable. ‘The idea that persistent facial characteristics can predict unethical action has largely been dismissed out of hand’ by scientists in recent times, Haselhuhn and Wong wrote.

Wide faces may mean wrong thoughts?

However, they added, recent findings have linked more aggressive tendencies in men to faces that are wide relative to their height. Such men are statistically more likely ‘to retaliate to perceived slights by others [and] to act in their own self-interest, even if it means violating another’s trust,’ Haselhuhn and Wong wrote. They cited the 2010 Psychological Science study and another that appeared that journal’s October 2009 issue, by Justin M. Carré of Brock University in Ontario and colleagues.

In their own study, Haselhuhn and Wong concluded that the greater propensity of men with these facial types to act unethically flows from a sense among these men that they have more power than average. Therefore, they tend to feel they can get away with it.

Haselhuhn and Wong recruited 192 Masters of Business Administration students for one experiment, grouping them into pairs in which they were instructed to engage in a fictional negotiation over a property sale. Unbeknownst to them, the terms of the negotiation were set up by the researchers to include some clear temptations for lying.

In a second experiment, the researchers asked 103 participants to submit a number of free entries to a lottery. The number of entries was supposed to be equal to the total of two dice rolled by the participant electronically. However, no one monitored these rolls, so it was up to the participants’ honour – again, a cheating opportunity.

Feelings of power enable one to cheat more

In both studies, the researchers found that the participants with relatively wider faces had a greater tendency to lie or cheat. In the second study, based on the results of a survey of participants, the scientists also concluded that feelings of power enabled these less scrupulous participants to cheat more.

‘Our research provides a new perspective to the study of the evolutionary foundations of morality by identifying a genetically determined physical predictor of unethical behaviour,’ the researchers wrote.

A major objection to the idea that facial features could predict bad behaviour, they said, has been that men with such features would swiftly drop out of the gene pool. Presumably, no one would trust them so they would have trouble mating. This objection loses force, Haselhuhn and Wong argued, if you suppose that the drawbacks of having such a face may be counterbalanced by an advantage, namely that those faces also signal aggression and dominance – a trait that appeals to many women.

(Image: Wikimedia commons)

Source: World Science, http://www.world-science.net