The pressure of examinations from an Asian parent

Does he look honest or deceitful?

Strangely, an absurd one-liner from one of the half-witted characters of The Office (the US TV series) sparked interest in this current post. In his attempt to gain personal information from his boss, Dwight Schrute claims that he has been known to have a trusted face… probably because of his low cheekbones. Despite the oddity of that statement, I simply had to research this for myself. As it turns out, while he had the information a bit twisted, he wasn't completely crazy for saying that.

According to studies by Princeton’s psychology researchers, Nikolaas Oosterhof and Alexander Todorov, we form our first impression of a person’s trustworthiness based on facial attributes of the person. Using 96 artificially-generated male faces, participants were asked to judge these faces as being trustworthy or untrustworthy. Statistical analyses from this study strongly correlate a set of facial attributes to feelings of trust while other features create feelings of distrust. Of the artificially-generated faces, those with high inner eyebrows, higher cheekbones, wider chins and noses with a shallow nose bridge looked more trustworthy. Likewise, faces with low inner eyebrows, shallow cheekbones, thin chins and a deep nose bridge were faces participants believed to be untrustworthy.

The researchers point out that when facial attributes of "trustworthy" faces are exaggerated they look happy, hence is associated with positive attributes while these features are exaggerated in faces deemed “untrustworthy” the face looks angry, hence tend to have negative associations. It would seem that people's unconscious biases play a great deal in how we form our opinions of others. As a result, we can quickly come to incorrect assumptions about other people and greatly misjudge them. Obviously a person’s cheekbone shape or eyebrow arc do not determine their trustworthiness, or lack of it. Yet we tend to make these conclusions about people.

Additionally, con men and scam artists (or as I’d like to call them “social engineers”) have already begun using facial engineering, as well as other skills, to enhance a sense of trust and rapport in their victims. Perhaps, when meeting new people in the near future (either a salesman, or a prospective business partner) we could exercise great caution and watch out for our tendencies to make judgment calls about their honesty, or lack of it, through their facial attributes.