People's face shapes influence how aggressive they are perceived to be, and this effect is most pronounced in young men and elderly women, a new study has suggested.
Researchers in Australia set out to investigate something called the facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR), defined as the "width of a face divided by the vertical distance between the highest point of the upper lip and the highest point of the eyelids." In other words, a wider face results in a higher FWHR.
According to the study, a higher FWHR in men has been associated with a number of perceptions about their character, including "dominance, aggression, threat and masculinity"though the accuracy of this is debated. It's also important to note that this study only investigated perceived aggression regarding face shape, and not actual aggression.
The study said that FWHR has been speculated as a "secondary sexual characteristic" that might change between sexes during periods of life associated with mate selection. Evidence for sexual dimorphismdifferences between male and femaleregarding FWHR has been mixed.
Now, researchers at the University of New South Wales School of Psychology have used a facial image database of the passport photos of more than 17,607 consenting Australians and 121 study participants to rate how aggressive they perceived them to be.
Ignoring perceptions of aggression for the moment, the researchers found that the overall average FWHR of the faces was 2.18. Age was a factor in the average score, with the FWHR tending to decrease the older people got. Sex was also a factor, with females generally having a larger FWHR than males.
However, this varied over time. Males had a significantly greater FWHR compared to females at ages 27 to 33, but females had a significantly greater FWHR compared to males at ages 48 older.
Regarding perceptions of aggression, the 121 participants were asked to rate 1,893 of the passport photos that were selected based on a high or low FWHR compared to other faces in their age ranges.
The researchers found that high-FWHR faces had higher perceived aggressiveness than low-FWHR faces and that this varied with age and sex.
The researchers found that "the relationships between the FWHR and perceived aggressiveness for males was strongest for the youngest age group of faces (2733 years old), but from 3461 years old, this relationship was strongest for female faces. These results suggest that the effect of FWHR on perceived aggressiveness ratings varies as a function of age and sex," according to the study.
Again, it is important to note that the study did not investigate whether people with higher FWHR scores were more aggressive than those with lower scores; merely that they were perceived to be. The researchers added that "stereotypes of older women can be particularly harmful, as they lead to appearance-based discrimination".
David White is the lead investigator in the Face Research Lab at the University of New South Wales in Australia and co-author of the research. He told Newsweek: "Prior work has shown that people with wider faces are perceived to be more aggressive, and there also appear to be some benefits of having a wider facefor example one study showed that CEOs with wider faces tended to lead more profitable companies.
"Most of this work has been focussed on young male faces, but our study shows that this effect on perceived aggressiveness also holds for female faces, and also throughout adulthood," White said. "In fact, we find the strongest effect of FWHR in females later in life. The implications of this finding have not been fully explored, but it does have some interesting implications for matriarchal societies and potentially for improving rates of female leadership in the workplace."
"Researchers in this field find that people readily make inferences about a person from their facial appearance," White continued. "They agree in the inferences they drawso some people are prone to being perceived as having certain behavioural tendencies simply from how they look.
"But it is extremely important to note that the evidence suggests that these inferences are almost always wrongthey are a very poor predictor of these behavioural tendencies and personality types. First impressions count, but they can not be counted on."
The researchers also acknowledge that there are limitations with their study; for example, they speculated that increasingly fewer males apply for passports later in life which would have skewed the results in terms of age, for example.
Danielle Sulikowski, a senior lecturer at the School of Psychology at Charles Sturt University in Australia and president of the Australasian Society for Human Behaviour and Evolution, who was not involved in the research, told Newsweek she thought it was a "nice study" and that the use of passports was "an excellent way" to sample a large section of the population, albeit not a completely representative one.
Asked whether the study might raise ethical concerns about judging people on their appearance, Sulikowski said: "The work itself doesn't raise ethical concerns. There is ample evidence that people make these inferences in real life. Seeking to understand the facial cues that people rely on for such judgements is neither an endorsement nor a condemnation of the behaviour itself. But there are numerous ethical issues that could be considered in this space."
FWHR has been used in other studies to determine human behavior. In 2017, researchers in Canada studied if face shape could reveal a person's sex drive and how likely they are to cheat in relationships.
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People With This Face Shape Are Seen As More Aggressive: Study - Newsweek