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…