- Dutton, Edward.
How to Judge People by What they Look Like.
Oulu, Finland: Thomas Edward Press, 2018.
ISBN 978-1-9770-6797-5.
-
In The Picture of Dorian Gray,
Oscar Wilde wrote,
People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial.
That may be so. But at least it is not as superficial
as Thought. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders.
It is only shallow people who do not judge by
appearances.
From childhood, however, we have been exhorted not to judge
people by their appearances. In
Skin in the Game (August 2019),
Nassim Nicholas Taleb advises choosing the surgeon who
“doesn't
look like a surgeon” because their success is more likely
due to competence than first impressions.
Despite this,
physiognomy,
assessing a person's characteristics from their appearance, is
as natural to humans as breathing, and has been an instinctual
part of human behaviour as old as our species. Thinkers and writers
from Aristotle through the great novelists of the 19th century
believed that an individual's character was reflected in, and
could be inferred from their appearance, and crafted and
described their characters accordingly. Jules Verne would
often spend a paragraph describing the appearance of his
characters and what that implied for their behaviour.
Is physiognomy all nonsense, a pseudoscience like
phrenology,
which purported to predict mental characteristics by measuring
bumps on the skull which were claimed indicate the development
of “cerebral organs” with specific functions? Or,
is there something to it, after all? Humans are a social
species and, as such, have evolved to be exquisitely sensitive
to signals sent by others of their kind, conveyed through subtle
means such as a tone of voice, facial expression, or posture.
Might we also be able to perceive and interpret messages which
indicate properties such as honesty, intelligence, courage,
impulsiveness, criminality, diligence, and more? Such an
ability, if possible, would be advantageous to individuals in
interacting with others and, contributing to success in
reproducing and raising offspring, would be selected for by
evolution.
In this short book (or long essay—the text is just 85
pages), the author examines the evidence and concludes that
there are legitimate correlations between appearance and
behaviour, and that human instincts are picking up genuine
signals which are useful in interacting with others. This
seems perfectly plausible: the development of the human body
and face are controlled by the genetic inheritance of the
individual and modulated through the effects of hormones, and
it is well-established that both genetics and hormones are
correlated with a variety of behavioural traits.
Let's consider a reasonably straightforward example. A
study published in 2008 found a statistically significant
correlation between the width of the face (cheekbone to
cheekbone distance compared to brow to upper lip) and
aggressiveness (measured by the number of penalty
minutes received) among a sample of 90 ice hockey
players. Now, a wide face is also known to correlate
with a high testosterone level in males, and testosterone
correlates with aggressiveness and selfishness. So, it
shouldn't be surprising to find the wide face morphology
correlated with the consequences of high-testosterone
behaviour.
In fact, testosterone and other hormone levels play a
substantial part in many of the correlations between appearance
and behaviour discussed by the author. Many people believe
they can identify, with reasonable reliability, homosexuals
just from their appearance: the term “gaydar”
has come into use for this ability. In 2017, researchers
trained an artificial intelligence program with a set of
photographs of individuals with known sexual orientations
and then tested the program on a set of more than 35,000
images. The program correctly identified the sexual
orientation of men 81% of the time and women with 74%
accuracy.
Of course, appearance goes well beyond factors which are inherited
or determined by hormones. Tattoos, body piercings, and other
irreversible modifications of appearance correlate with low
time preference, which correlates with low intelligence and
the other characteristics of r-selected
lifestyle. Choices of clothing indicate an individual's
self-identification, although fashion trends change rapidly
and differ from region to region, so misinterpretation is a
risk.
The author surveys a wide variety of characteristics including
fat/thin body type, musculature, skin and hair, height,
face shape, breast size in women, baldness and beards in men,
eye spacing, tattoos, hair colour, facial symmetry,
handedness, and finger length ratio, and presents
citations to research, most published recently, supporting
correlations between these aspects of appearance and
behaviour. He cautions that while people may be good at
sensing and interpreting these subtle signals among members
of their own race, there are substantial and consistent
differences between the races, and no inferences can be
drawn from them, nor are members of one race generally
able to read the signals from members of another.
One gets the sense (although less strongly) that this is another
field where advances in genetics and data science are piling
up a mass of evidence which will roll over the stubborn defenders
of the “blank slate” like a truth tsunami. And
again, this is an area where people's instincts, honed by
millennia of evolution, are still relied upon despite the
scorn of “experts”. (So afraid were the authors
of the Wikipedia
page
on physiognomy [retrieved 2019-12-16] of the “computer
gaydar” paper mentioned above that they declined to cite
the
peer reviewed paper in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology but
instead linked to a BBC News piece which dismissed
it as “dangerous” and “junk science”.
Go on whistling, folks, as the wave draws near and begins to crest….)
Is the case for physiognomy definitively made? I think not, and
as I suspect the author would agree, there are many aspects of
appearance and a multitude of personality traits, some of which
may be significantly correlated and others not at all. Still,
there is evidence for some linkage, and it appears to be growing
as more work in the area (which is perilous to the careers of
those who dare investigate it) accumulates. The scientific
evidence, summarised here, seems to be, as so often happens,
confirming the instincts honed over hundreds of generations by
the inexorable process of evolution: you can form some
conclusions just by observing people, and this information is
useful in the competition which is life on Earth. Meanwhile,
when choosing programmers for a project team, the one who shows up
whose eyebrows almost meet their hairline, sporting a plastic baseball
cap worn backward with the adjustment strap on the smallest peg,
with a scraggly soybeard, pierced nose, and visible tattoos isn't
likely to be my pick. She's probably a WordPress developer.
December 2019 