To predict what first impression we will make on others, you can use a regular ruler. The fact is that the size and proportions of facial features determine what qualities we tend to attribute to the owner of this face. Pretty creepy discovery, if you think about it.
Previous studies – using the brain scan method – have already established that the first impression of a person is formed in a tenth of a second, therefore it is perceived by us as automatic, intuitive. But what exactly is the work done by the brain in these milliseconds? Neuropsychologists from the University of York (UK), led by Professor Andy Young (Andrew W. Young) and Dr. Tom Hartley (Tom Hartley) have taken an important step towards answering this question. The results of the study are published in the July issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
In their experiment, they relied on three scales of qualities, which, as established by previous studies, together form the impression of people. The first scale is “Attitude”: does this person want to harm me or do a good deed? The second is “Youthfulness / Attractiveness”, by which we evaluate a person as a suitable romantic partner or a worthy rival / rival in love affairs. The third is “Dominance”: is this person able to realize their intentions, good or bad, in relation to me?
The researchers collected a thousand photos of people on social networks – of different sexes, ages, taken in different situations, with different facial expressions, from different angles, in different lighting conditions, with different photo quality. The only thing that was common to those depicted in the photographs was belonging to the European race, since otherwise the result could be influenced by racial and ethnic prejudices. All faces were carefully measured for 65 parameters, such as, for example, “thickness of the eyebrows” and “width of the mouth.”
Then, six volunteers reviewed all of these photographs and ranked their impressions of the faces in them on three scales. Then the artificial neural network, a computer model that mimics the work of the human brain, went into action. This emulator “studied” the relationship between the subjective assessments of people in photographs and the measured parameters and revealed the characteristics that are responsible for our perception of human faces.
The same process, carried out in reverse, confirmed the conclusions: based on artificial brain data that associated certain facial features with certain personality traits, schematic drawings were drawn up and produced on living people (this time different, not those who were assessed photos) exactly the impression that was expected.
The key factor in assessing whether we are benevolent or malevolent is our smile, a facial expression that we can at least control. It is very difficult to do something with the other two scales. As it turned out, people judge “youthfulness / attractiveness” by the eyes and the area around the eyes. About dominance – either by masculine features, such as the shape of the jaw, the height of the eyebrows, or the severity of the cheekbones, or by the texture and tone of the skin, which are associated with a flowering look and a healthy tan.
The practical implications of the patterns identified by Yang, Hartley and colleagues go well beyond explaining the reactions to our photos that we post on social media or send to potential employers as attachments to our resumes. It is enough to think, for example, about the work of a jury or about elections and the possibility of influencing their result by offering voters a candidate with a more or less “suitable” face. “There is more than enough evidence that you can’t judge a book by its cover, and yet we all do it,” said Tom Hartley.
* Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, июль 2014.