Face Value: The importance of feminine mystique in perceived facial trustworthiness.

Abstract

People have used physiognomy to infer personality from faces for centuries, including the godfather of criminal anthropology, Cesare Lombroso. Trait evaluations from facial perception predict important outcomes, including sentencing decisions, despite having low predictive power for real world behaviour. Our study hypothesised that feminised female faces would be perceived as more trustworthy than masculinised female faces, due to previous research showing that neotenous faces are perceived as more honest, along with research, supported by evolutionary theory, that feminine females are perceived as cooperative. Participants were shown 48 female faces on computer screens 50% feminised and 50% masculinised and asked to rate the perceived trustworthiness of each face. A t-test was used to find that feminised female faces were perceived as significantly more trustworthy than masculinised female faces. However, we suggest that future studies introduce an ‘‘attractiveness’’ component, a more contextual definition of trustworthiness, and a more gender-balanced partcipant sample. The significance of our findings suggest that law makers should question the role that facial perception should play in the judicial system.

Introduction
The belief that personality can be inferred from facial appearance has persisted over centuries, with the pseudoscience of physiognomy famously recognisable in Dickensian literature and more contemporary literature…