Over the years, the ability to quickly extract information from faces has given us an edge in predicting character and behavior. It helps us to discern who’s sick and whom to trust, who’s flirtworthy , and who might blow up at a moment’s notice. To get a sense of others’ religiosity, Sexual orientation, promiscuity, aggressiveness, competence, intelligence, and even trustworthiness, you might think that you should focus on how they act, not how they look. But then you’d neglect your swiftest insights.
The consistent above-chances rate at which we correctly extrapolate character traits from facial features taps into core questions of identity: Are appearance and behavior linked by underlying biological processes such as hormones- or do beautiful visages and aggressive miens elicit lifelong treatment that reinforces an individual’s behavior? It is the ultimate chicken-and –egg question, and it plays out on every face you meet.
Attractiveness and Personality
Beauty and health are tightly linked. The closer a face is to the symmetrical proportions of Gwyneth Paltrow or Zac Efron, and to the average face in a population, the more it advertises development stability, meaning that pathogens or generic mutations have not adversely affected its owner.
Good look also confer a well-documented ”halo effect”: a beautiful man or woman is consistently evaluated in a positive light. Good-looking people are assumed to be smarter than their homelier peers, although there is no correlation between intelligence and appearance above a median level of attractiveness.
Appearance interact with personality in a complicated ways-good –looking people are consistantly rated higher on positive trait and probably received the highest ratings for extraversion and agreeableness. Yet more on the halo effect is as work, as the owners of those good-looking faces also rated themselves to be higher on these traits. More impressively, when judges looked at digital composition made from people who scores at the extremes for extraversion and agreeableness (and, for woman, openness), they gave those faces the highest attractiveness ratings. The judges didn’t know that the composites were made from the faces of exceptionally outgoing and easygoing people. (For man only, facial composities generated from the most conscientious and emotionally stable subjects were also rated as more attractive tat those made from subjects with the lowest scores for these attributes)
Clearly, the stereotype “What is beautiful is good” contains at least a kernel of truth. Here, then, is the chicken-and –egg puzzle that runs throughout face perception research. Do the biological blessing behind good looking gives rise to a sparkling personality; or do attractive people exhibit the socially desirable traits of extraversion and agreeableness because society treats swans better than ugly ducklings?
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