Shape of your face reveals your politics, study confirms

SOME people really do have Right-wing faces, scientists have suggested.

Stanford University has found that political beliefs can be determined simply based on inherent facial characteristics – and artificial intelligence can pick up on them. Left-wingers tend to have smaller, lower faces, with lips and noses oriented further downward towards their chins when compared to conservatives, who tend to have larger lower faces, the research found.

For the study, researchers at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business asked 591 participants to complete a questionnaire about their political beliefs and have their portraits taken.

To avoid bias, researchers made sure participants removed all jewellery and make-up, and asked them to shave facial hair and pull back their hair.

The algorithm was able to spot political orientations even though facial expression, grooming and head orientation were all the same. Portraits were shown to human raters who were able to accurately assess where participants fell on the political spectrum, simply based on face shape. The results showed the accuracy achieved by humans and the algorithm was comparable.

The model was also able to predict the political orientation of 3,401 politicians from the UK, the US and Canada.

Researchers said the ability of an algorithm to correctly spot political allegiance was alarming. Writing in the journal American Psychologist, they said: “Perhaps most crucially, our findings suggest that widespread biometric surveillance technologies are more threatening than previously thought.

“Our results, suggesting that stable facial features convey a substantial amount of the signal, imply that individuals have less control over their privacy.” They added: “Even moderately accurate algorithms can have a tremendous impact when applied to large populations in high-stakes contexts. For example, even crude estimates of people’s character traits can significantly improve the efficiency of online mass persuasion campaigns.”