Can You Spot a Liar Just by Someone's Looks? | Alexander Todorov | Big Think

Can You Spot a Liar Just by Someone's Looks?

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Not long ago, most people would probably judge how trustworthy you were based entirely on your physical appearance. More specifically, the pseudoscience of physiognomy claimed that a person's facial expressions could tell you a lot about their personality: were they honest, would you get along with them, are they good at their job, etc. Today, we know that kind of thinking is a dangerous pseudoscience. We also know that looks do play a big role in how we evaluate people, and that these evaluations are often based on cultural stereotypes. Psychology professor Alexander Todorov explains how our biases affect the way we treat people, and by extension, how we think of ourselves in relation to them. Alexander Todorov is the author of Face Value: The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions.

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ALEXANDER TODOROV:

Alexander Todorov is professor of psychology at Princeton University, where he is also affiliated with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His research on first impressions has been covered by media around the world, including the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, the Daily Telegraph, Scientific American, PBS, and NPR. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ALEXANDER TODOROV: So physiognomy, or the so-called pseudoscience of reading character from faces, has a very, very long history. The first historical document dates all the way back to the time of Aristotle, but it really got extremely, extremely popular in the 18th and 19th century.

And for a while there were quite a few studies in the beginning of the 20th century—we're talking the '20s, in the '30s—by psychologists finding very, very little evidence for the accuracy of physiognomic inferences.

And recently there was, for example, a computer science paper claiming that presumably you can guess whether a person is a criminal or not based on their facial image. And actually the history of identifying the criminal has a very, very long history in physiognomy.

There's lots of studies showing effects of appearance across different domains. In my own lab more than ten years ago we showed that you can predict electoral success based on judgment from the appearance of politicians. Then there have been many other studies in the legal domains. For example, recent studies show that prisoners who are sentenced to death for the same crime as those we were sentence to a life-sentence without parole, the main difference was the prisoners who were sentenced to death looked less “trustworthy.”

There's been a lot of evidence in economic games. So for example, economists love the sort of economic game where we have interactions and if I don't know anything about you I have a risky choice whether to invest in you or not.

But if I invest and you're trustworthy, then we are both better off, but if you're untrustworthy you can take away my money and run away. So it creates this risky situation and many studies suggest that in fact if we think the appearance of the other person is untrustworthy, we tend not to invest in these people.

Interestingly there was a study that was done in Germany and Switzerland when in fact people played anonymously, and they also did different measurements of their faces, it turns out that these measurements that are supposed to predict untrustworthiness or aggressiveness didn't predict at all how people will behave in this kind of an anonymous economic game.

The interesting part is that these participants, they were incentivized for accurate responsiveness. And so for every accurate response they were essentially trying to predict what the person did in the situation, they ended up losing money because they were relying on these kinds of appearance.

But you can see how in a real life situation you can have all kinds of self-fulfilling prophecies.

So we come and play with you in a game, I decided for some reason that you're untrustworthy so my first move is not a cooperative move. Well, you reciprocate in a similar way. I don't trust you, so why would you trust me? And that kind of leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So you can create these kinds of dynamic inconsistency in the situation, where in fact the people could be perfectly trustworthy and might cooperate, but the appearance cues can get into the way.

Now, to the extent th...

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