Are you a shallow person? Do you make snap judgements about people based solely on their looks? None of us would like to answer “yes†to those questions but in reality the reason why so much effort goes into billboard, magazine cover, and book cover design is that we do judge a book by its cover and that holds true for human beings as well. If you are huffing with indignation feeling that you look deeper for the soul qualities in your fellow humans then that may well be true in the long run but research tells us that first impressions are an instinctive phenomenon and that we base them on visual appearance, after all, what else do we have to go on in those first few moments? This has all been quantified in a new study showing that your face is the basis of how people judge you in those first moments.
These researchers started from the premise that previous research has shown that our first impressions of others include making three basic decisions about them that can be divided into these categories: approachability (will this person help or harm you), dominance (do they have the ability to help or harm you), and youthful-attractiveness (will they be a rival or a romantic partner). What the researchers wanted to establish was whether the face could communicate these traits and whether they could quantify what parts of the face might relate to each quality.
To test this they had subjects look at more than 1,000 faces in photographs and make judgements about the qualities of the people in the photographs. Using mathematical models derived after taking 65 measurements of each person’s face they then sought to see if they could make cartoon faces that would communicate the same traits based on manipulation of the facial features in line what their modelling found.
Their results did find a link between select facial features and the qualities we assign to a person in that first moment of meeting.
They found for instance that approachability relates to mouth dimensions and mouth shape including things like mouth width, mouth height, mouth gap, and bottom lip curve. A smiling expression of course is the key element of approachability. Youthful-attractiveness was found to relate to dimensions of the eyes like iris area, eye width, and eye height. Dominance was found to correlate with eyebrow height, cheek gradient, eye gradient, and skin colour.
There is no way around it, you just have to face it, in those first moments of meeting we are all just a teeny bit shallow.
