Reading Faces
Leslie A. Zebrowitz
Taken from The Boston Globe, Sunday October 5, 1997:
"FACIAL ATTRACTION"
By John Yemma, Globe Staff
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There is strong evidence, in fact, that humans are hard-wired for face reading, for trying to find what Shakespeare called ``the mind's construction'' in the turn of a lip, the quality of a complexion, the width of a forehead.
To keep things clear, please note that there are two forms of face reading. One is an instinctual human skill with some credibility and an unfortunate tendency to get misapplied; the other is out and out hogwash. The instinctual form of face reading stems from an ancient human need to determine the gender, age, race, emotional state, and physical and mental health of an individual, says Leslie Zebrowitz, a professor of psychology at Brandeis University. At this level, face reading is neither mystical nor especially impressive. All healthy humans are good at distinguishing children from adults, the robust from the weak, the sad from the happy, the ladies from the gentlemen. No big deal.
We usually want to know much more about people, however, and we frequently don't have enough objective information on which to base a sound judgment. So we go to a cocktail party and wing it. We look at a face and think we can tell if a person is honest, kind, intelligent, and might make a good dinner companion. Our basis for striking up a conversation is often how comely or open-faced that person is. And that, says Zebrowitz, author of a fascinating new book called Reading Faces, is where we get into trouble.
It would be great if we were always wrong about our instincts. Then face reading could be roundly condemned as archaic hooey, like phrenology or entrails analysis. Unfortunately, because a face can convey legitimate, if basic, information about an individual, we tend to give face reading more credence than it deserves, Zebrowitz says. Although mental or physical illness can be apparent on one's face, humans often overgeneralize what they see. Harmless irregularities in facial features of perfectly normal people can resemble those associated with mental or physical illness but have nothing to do with a person's health. A dead-wrong prejudice can result.
Which is bad enough. But then there is the other, totally bogus form of face reading, which confuses matters further and gives the gullible even more reason to dwell on facial features as a window to the soul. Widespread in Asia, face-reading-as-fortune-telling also has a significant following among New Agers in the United States. Called physiognomy, characterology, or personology, it is really just a variation on palm reading: An adept takes your money, checks out your mug, and says flattering and mysterious things about you. However skilled such practitioners are at attracting clients, it goes without saying that judging a person's fate by the distance between his eyebrows or the angle of her chin is nonsense.
Even if we steer clear of such sideshow scams, however, we all remain prone, says Zebrowitz, to our ingrained inclination to read faces -- and this can deeply influence us and those around us. We pay attention to well-proportioned faces in advertisements, coo when we look at a baby's face, and defer to classical beauty wherever we encounter it. It is what makes supermodels rich and celebrity worship so dominant. And it can steer us very wrong.
Several years ago, Zebrowitz studied the faces of individuals involved in cases in small-claims court in Boston. Baby-faced people prevailed more often than those with more mature faces, leading Zebrowitz to theorize that the hallowed right to stand before the bar of justice, face one's accusers, and look a jury in the eye might actually be an impediment to justice. Personal appearance, it seems, can get in the way of the facts.
And ``faceism,'' as Zebrowitz terms it, doesn't occur only in a courtroom; it is pervasive. Our problem is that we act as if this is not the case. We talk about judging people on merit, on the content of their character, when far too often we unthinkingly default to our face prejudices, favoring the handsome and shunning the homely. To deny that we do it, Zebrowitz says, is to allow superficial biases to rule our experience.
Attractive people get more job offers than unattractive ones, are handled more deferentially in encounters with police officers, and rise higher in society, Zebrowitz says. This is both the result of society's reaction to people judged attractive -- the ``attractiveness halo effect,'' she calls it -- and a self-fulfilling prophecy loop that comes into play. A baby-faced person and an attractive person may end up acting the way an adoring audience thinks they should act.
We don't have to just sit back and let the babes of the world run roughshod over us, however. Parents, teachers, and the media can be aware of facial stereotyping and try to get beyond it. ``It's long been known that people judge each other by appearance,'' Zebrowitz says. ``What I'm saying is, `Can we have some principles about this?' ''
Zebrowitz is worth listening to. When I met her, I knew she would be worth listening to. She has a pleasantly attractive face that, to my eye, indicates she is analytical, incisive, and interesting. I'd also read her book.
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