FACTS d y ed ent”
volunteers to judge pre-rated faces, some beautiful and others homely. The judges claimed that they didn’t see anything; the faces flashed by too quickly. Yet, when coaxed to rate the attractiveness of the faces that they thought they hadn’t seen, they were astonishingly accurate. Each face was exposed for 13 milliseconds, well below the threshold of conscious awareness. That’s how quick we are to judge looks.
Beauty and health are tightly linked. The closer a face is to the symmetrical proportions of Gwyneth Paltrow or Zac Efron, and to the average face in a population, the more it advertises developmental stability, meaning that pathogens or genetic mutations have not adversely affected its owner.
Good looks also confer a welldocumented “halo effect”: a beautiful man or woman is consistently assumed to be smarter, although there is no correlation between intelligence and appearance above a median level of attractiveness.
Appearance interacts with personality in complicated ways — good-looking people are consistently rated higher on positive traits. When volunteers were asked to evaluate faces in a British study, the most attractive individuals received the highest ratings.
Yet more than the halo effect is at work, because the owners of those good-looking faces also rated themselves to be higher on these traits.
Clearly, the stereotype “what is beautiful is good” contains at least a kernel of truth. Here, then, is the big chicken-or-egg puzzle that runs throughout face perception research: do the biological blessings behind good looks give rise to a sparkling personality; or do attractive people exhibit socially desirable traits because society treats swans better than ugly ducklings?
Sex hormones are one clear link between appearance and personality. Testosterone and oestrogen influence facial development as well as behaviour. High testosterone shows itself in strong jawbones, darker colouring, and hollower cheekbones. High oestrogen reveals itself in smooth skin, a small chin, sparse facial hair, arched eyebrows and plump lips.
We make numerous assumptions about people with high-hormone profiles that conform to gender norms: first, that they’re hot.
In a line-up, the high-oestrogen Jessica Alba and Beyonce types receive the highest attractiveness ratings by both genders. Their pretty faces predictably get top ratings for social dominance (high status). As for men, high-testosterone faces are especially desired by women who are ovulating, although women may have a default preference for men with a mix of masculine and feminine features — dominant and co-operative. Think Brad Pitt’s manly jawline and sensuous lips.
At the University of St. Andrews, volunteers of both genders could tell, with above-chance accuracy, whether people were promiscuous (open to one-night stands) just by looking at photos of their faces. Among women, high-oestrogen feminine faces were accurately rated as the most promiscuous — and the most beautiful. Among men, the Lothario face (a composite of the most promiscuous males) had hightestosterone features: slightly smaller eyes, larger noses, and broader cheekbones. Women accurately judged this face as belonging to a playboy and downgraded it in favour of men who looked — and actually were — more committed and monogamous.
Do highly feminine-looking women and masculine-looking men have hormone profiles that give rise to stronger sex drives, or do their looks simply lead to more sexual opportunities?
The likely answer is both: nature and nurture are inseparable. And yet, there’s a clear message. The next time you’re on an online dating site and get a feeling about a person’s romantic trustworthiness, you should listen to that instinct. GAYDAR When the singer Adam Lambert came out, nobody blinked. Even without all the circumstantial evidence, we might have a feeling about the sexual orientation of Lambert just by looking at his face.
“Gaydar” — the ability to determine at a glance whether someone is gay or lesbian — depends, in part, on gender norms. Curious about gaydar’s reliability, Ambady and Rule devised experiments in which they asked volunteers to take a look at close-cropped