LOOK OF CORRUPTION

SPOTTING a corrupt politician might be as easy as taking a long, hard look at his face.

Researchers at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in the US, have found that when people were shown photos of politicians who they are not familiar with, they could more often than not pick up if the official was corrupt.

The researchers found their subjects were making judgments on the width of the politician’s faces. Their success rate was slightly better than a random guess, but the researchers pointed out that these judgments become much more accurate when they were combined across a group of people. The study appeared in the journal Psychological Science.

Face wideness or the facial width to height ratio has been shown in earlier studies to correlate with aggressive behaviour in men. Research also found that wide-faced men were perceived by others as more threatening than men with thinner faces.

“It might be difficult to understand why you can look at others’ faces and tell something about them,” said Chujun Lin, study co-author and Caltech graduate student. “But there is no doubt that people form first impressions from faces all the time. For example, on dating sites people often reject potential matches based on pictures without reading the profile.”

The researchers explained that there could be many reasons for this. One is that a dishonest-faced politician might be offered bribes more often. It might also be that corrupt-looking politicians are often more suspected of corruption, which leads to them being investigated more.