http://www.economist.com/node/18925759THESE days, physiognomy is an unfashionable science. The idea that character is etched into an individual’s face is so much at variance with modern notions of free will that research in the area dwindled long ago. But it is making a tentative comeback. Two recent studies of faces suggest that their features do matter, biologically speaking: they can predict dishonesty and they can provoke orgasm.
The study on dishonesty was done by Michael Haselhuhn and Elaine Wong of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Dr Haselhuhn and Dr Wong wondered if a feature already known to reflect aggressiveness in men (but not women) might also predict a tendency to lie and cheat. That feature is the ratio of a face’s width to its length. The wider a man’s face, the more likely he will hit you.
Honest signals of aggressiveness make sense. Potential victims avoid starting fights they cannot win, while the aggressive get their way without risking injury. It does not, however, obviously make sense to give away in advance of a negotiation that you are likely to lie or cheat in it. Yet Dr Haselhuhn and Dr Wong found this was the case. In both a staged negotiation using MBA students and a separate experiment in which ordinary undergraduates were given an opportunity to earn more money if they misreported the results of a series of die rolls, the two researchers found that the wider a man’s face was, compared with its height, the more likely he was to lie about his intentions (in the case of the negotiations) or cheat (in the case of the die rolls). That did not, however, apply to women.
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