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The biasing effects of appearances go beyond physical attractiveness and mating motives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2017

Christopher Y. Olivola  and
Alexander Todorov
Christopher Y. Olivola
Affiliation:
Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213olivola@cmu.eduhttps://sites.google.com/site/chrisolivola/
Alexander Todorov
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540.atodorov@princeton.eduhttp://tlab.princeton.edu/
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Abstract

The influence of appearances goes well beyond physical attractiveness and includes the surprisingly powerful impact of “face-ism” – the tendency to stereotype individuals based on their facial features. A growing body of research has revealed that these face-based social attributions bias the outcomes of labor markets and experimental economic games in ways that are hard to explain via evolutionary mating motives.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 40 , 2017 , e38
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

In their review of the literature, and the arguments that follow, Maestripieri et al. largely overlook the fact that the biasing effects of appearances go well beyond physical attractiveness and include the surprisingly powerful impact of face-based social attributions (e.g., the extent to which a person has a competent-looking or trustworthy-looking face). Missing from their article is a discussion of the role of “face-ism” – the tendency to stereotype individuals based on their facial appearances. A growing body of research has revealed that people spontaneously form social attributions from facial cues (Todorov et al. Reference Todorov, Olivola, Dotsch and Mende-Siedlecki2015); that these face-based attributions can bias a variety of important decisions (Olivola et al. Reference Olivola, Funk and Todorov2014b), including those made in labor market contexts and experimental economic games; and that they do so above and beyond physical attractiveness. Many of these face-ism biases are hard to reconcile with evolutionary theories and harder still to explain in terms of mating goals.

1. Face-based social attributions predict labor market outcome

There is copious evidence that individuals seem to benefit from having faces that we stereotypically associate with desirable traits (Olivola et al. Reference Olivola, Funk and Todorov2014b; Todorov et al. Reference Todorov, Olivola, Dotsch and Mende-Siedlecki2015). Military cadets who have more dominant-looking faces achieve higher ranks (Mueller & Mazur Reference Mueller and Mazur1996), which may help explain why military leaders have distinctively dominant (or “cold”-looking) faces relative to other types of leaders (Olivola et al. Reference Olivola, Eubanks and Lovelace2014a). CEOs who have more competent-looking faces receive higher compensation, despite not performing any better (Graham et al., Reference Graham, Harvey and Puriin press); in fact, their facial competence predicts their compensation better than their facial attractiveness (Graham et al., in press). Political candidates who have more competent-looking faces receive larger vote shares during elections, after controlling for their facial attractiveness (Olivola & Todorov Reference Olivola and Todorov2010); here too, facial competence is a better predictor of success than facial attractiveness (Olivola & Todorov Reference Olivola and Todorov2010). Political candidates who have more conservative-looking faces are also more popular with conservative voters, despite these political facial stereotypes being unrelated to physical attractiveness (Olivola et al. Reference Olivola, Sussman, Tsetsos, Kang and Todorov2012). People are more likely to lend or donate money to individuals who (visually) look trustworthy, after controlling for their physical attractiveness and a host of financial and demographic variables (Duarte et al. Reference Duarte, Siegel and Young2012; Jenq et al. Reference Jenq, Pan and Theseira2015). Recent studies have also shown that facial trustworthiness predicts corporate status (Linke et al. Reference Linke, Saribay and Kleisner2016), and even academic research productivity (Dilger et al. Reference Dilger, Lütkenhöner and Müller2015), to a greater extent than facial attractiveness.

2. Face-based social attributions bias decisions in experimental economic games

Research has also shown that face-ism biases choices in experimental economic games. For example, a number of studies have demonstrated that senders in the trust game invest significantly more in receivers who have trustworthy-looking faces than in those with untrustworthy-looking faces (Bailey et al. Reference Bailey, Szczap, McLennan, Slessor, Ruffman and Rendell2016; Chang et al. Reference Chang, Doll, van't Wout, Frank and Sanfey2010; Ewing et al. Reference Ewing, Caulfield, Read and Rhodes2015a; Reference Ewing, Caulfield, Read and Rhodes2015b; Rezlescu et al. Reference Rezlescu, Duchaine, Olivola and Chater2012; Tingley Reference Tingley2014; van't Wout & Sanfey Reference van't Wout and Sanfey2008). In another type of experiment, involving a “debt game” in which players had to guess whether potential lenders were going to charge them no-, moderate-, or high-interest rates on their debt, participants were more willing to borrow from lenders with trustworthy-looking faces than from those with untrustworthy-looking faces, even though these facial cues were uncorrelated with the lenders' actual decisions (Suzuki & Suga Reference Suzuki and Suga2010). The biasing influence of facial trustworthiness in experimental economic games is a robust phenomenon: It has been demonstrated across age groups, including young children (Ewing et al. Reference Ewing, Caulfield, Read and Rhodes2015a; Reference Ewing, Caulfield, Read and Rhodes2015b), young adults (Bailey et al. Reference Bailey, Szczap, McLennan, Slessor, Ruffman and Rendell2016; Chang et al. Reference Chang, Doll, van't Wout, Frank and Sanfey2010; Suzuki & Suga Reference Suzuki and Suga2010; Tingley Reference Tingley2014; van't Wout & Sanfey Reference van't Wout and Sanfey2008), and older adults (Bailey et al. Reference Bailey, Szczap, McLennan, Slessor, Ruffman and Rendell2016), and also across countries, including the United States (Chang et al. Reference Chang, Doll, van't Wout, Frank and Sanfey2010; Tingley Reference Tingley2014; van't Wout & Sanfey Reference van't Wout and Sanfey2008), the United Kingdom (Rezlescu et al. Reference Rezlescu, Duchaine, Olivola and Chater2012), Australia (Bailey et al. Reference Bailey, Szczap, McLennan, Slessor, Ruffman and Rendell2016; Ewing et al. Reference Ewing, Caulfield, Read and Rhodes2015a; Reference Ewing, Caulfield, Read and Rhodes2015b), and Japan (Suzuki & Suga Reference Suzuki and Suga2010). Only children with autism spectrum disorder were shown to be immune to this bias (Ewing et al. Reference Ewing, Caulfield, Read and Rhodes2015a). Moreover, this bias persists (albeit to a smaller degree) in the face of contradictory reputational information concerning the receiver's trustworthiness (Rezlescu et al. Reference Rezlescu, Duchaine, Olivola and Chater2012). Importantly, facial trustworthiness influences investments in the trust game even when facial attractiveness fails to do so (van't Wout & Sanfey Reference van't Wout and Sanfey2008), or when the facial stimuli have been designed to vary primarily in terms of their perceived trustworthiness (Bailey et al. Reference Bailey, Szczap, McLennan, Slessor, Ruffman and Rendell2016; Rezlescu et al. Reference Rezlescu, Duchaine, Olivola and Chater2012; Tingley Reference Tingley2014).

3. The biasing effects of face-based social attributions are difficult to explain in terms of evolutionary mating motives

Although the biasing effects of physical attractiveness may be well explained in terms of evolutionary mating motives, the same is not true of face-based trait inferences. Consider labor market outcomes: Evolutionary mating motives cannot explain why, even after controlling for physical attractiveness, face-based social attributions predict income (Graham et al., in press), professional status (Linke et al. Reference Linke, Saribay and Kleisner2016; Mueller & Mazur Reference Mueller and Mazur1996), political success (Olivola & Todorov Reference Olivola and Todorov2010; Olivola et al. Reference Olivola, Sussman, Tsetsos, Kang and Todorov2012), and the ability to attract loans (Duarte et al. Reference Duarte, Siegel and Young2012) or donations (Jenq et al. Reference Jenq, Pan and Theseira2015). Nor can they explain why political facial stereotypes (how conservative a political candidate's face makes him or her look) predict the voting preferences of Republicans but not Democrats (Olivola et al. Reference Olivola, Sussman, Tsetsos, Kang and Todorov2012), despite both groups having (presumably similar) mating motives. Or consider results from the trust game: Evolutionary mating motives fail to explain why 5-year-olds and 10-year-olds (who presumably lack sexual interest) are more willing to invest in individuals who have trustworthy-looking faces (Ewing et al. Reference Ewing, Caulfield, Read and Rhodes2015a; Reference Ewing, Caulfield, Read and Rhodes2015b), or why adult players are more willing to invest in individuals represented by trustworthy-looking computerized faces (Bailey et al. Reference Bailey, Szczap, McLennan, Slessor, Ruffman and Rendell2016; Rezlescu et al. Reference Rezlescu, Duchaine, Olivola and Chater2012; Tingley Reference Tingley2014), despite the (very) limited sexual appeal of these avatar-like face stimuli. In fact, face-based social attributions have been shown to predict mating preferences, above and beyond physical attractiveness (Olivola et al. Reference Olivola, Eastwick, Finkel, Hortaçsu, Ariely and Todorov2016). In sum, researchers need to recognize that the biasing effects of appearances go well beyond physical attractiveness and mating motives.

References

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