Impressions shaped by facial appearance foster biased decisions

On Facebook, remarks judging people, such as politicians or people accused of crimes, on the bases of their facial expressions are common, despite the fact that most of us do not have flattering driver's license pictures.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-10/cp-isb101314.php

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 21-Oct-2014

Contact: Mary Beth O'Leary
Cell Press
Impressions shaped by facial appearance foster biased decisions

Research in recent years has shown that people associate specific facial traits with an individual's personality. For instance, people consistently rate faces that appear more feminine or that naturally appear happy as looking more trustworthy. In addition to trustworthiness, people also consistently associate competence, dominance, and friendliness with specific facial traits. According to an article published by Cell Press on October 21st in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, people rely on these subtle and arbitrary facial traits to make important decisions, from voting for a political candidate to convicting a suspect for a crime. Referring to this systemic bias as "face-ism," the authors present its real-world consequences and discuss potential ways of overcoming it.

"Although we would like to think our judgments and choices are rational, impartial, consistent, and solely based on relevant information, the truth is that they are often biased by superficial and irrelevant factors," says Christopher Olivola of Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, lead author of the review article, which he co-authored with Princeton University researchers Friederike Funk and Alexander Todorov. "This is a troubling human tendency that needs to be corrected, or at least mitigated, because faces are not valid predictors of a person's traits."

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Although face-ism is widespread, research suggests that it could be reduced by arming people with more relevant and valid types of information. For instance, knowing more about a political candidate and his or her positions or past behavior makes voters less likely to be influenced by facial traits. "We need to guard against letting our choices be biased by superficial cues," Olivola says. "In some contexts, educating people might be sufficient to reduce facial stereotyping. In other contexts, however, more research will be needed to identify the best way to mitigate the biasing influence of facial appearance."

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