Judging a book by its cover

It’s tempting to guess personality traits from a person’s face, and novelists sometimes will give a character facial features that supposedly indicate what kind of person the character is. Whether there really is a correlation between how you look and how you act is unclear, but some recent research conducted by a social psychologist at the University of Michigan offers some interesting new data. Undergrads, male and female, were shown images of a variety of male faces doctored to look more or less masculine. The subjects had to answer questions about the characteristics of the men and choose which of them they would prefer for certain things (as a friend, as a date, etc.). They tended to rate the owners of the more masculine faces as being more likely to go after someone else’s girlfriend, two-time their own lovers, tangle with the boss, or get into fights, whereas the owners of the less masculine faces were judged more likely to make good parents or husbands and be responsible about going to work.

The interesting thing is that there may be some link between how masculine a guy’s face looks and how he behaves, because facial features are influenced by testosterone levels early in life, and testosterone levels are in turn linked to rates of divorce, infidelity, and violent behavior. (I’m assuming that is testosterone levels during adulthood, although the article is not clear, and I’m not sure what relationship there is between developmental and adult levels of testosterone.) Men and women subjects tended to react to the high-T or low-T faces in ways that would seem to enhance their own ability to successfully reproduce, so whether or not there is any meaningful link between looks and behavior, people certainly seem to act as though there is.

1/31/07 I meant to add a link: here’s the article from Science Daily.