medical phrenology

[gusl]

OkCupid could easily do a lot of research, after tests like the one that tests your ability to pick out gay people / virgins. I wonder if psychology departments would be willing to pay them.

Can you tell how tall someone is from their face?

Of course, one would like to control for correlations between the investigated property and consciously-accessible features, such as beauty / race / hairdo / jewelry. e.g. one who predicts Asians to be shorter would tend to score positively, even if race is the only feature they can see (although such inferences can be also be made unconsciouly)

Psychologists say that people attribute innocence and honesty to baby-faced people. This could easily and cheaply tested on OkCupid, if only we have a way of measuring baby-facedness.

from Science of Physiognomy:

... For example, they judge the babyface feature of relatively wide eyes as indicating more honesty and naivete, consistent with a traditional physiognomic view. Another line of research studies has shown that people actually do tend to have jobs that are consistent with stereotypes about the meaning of their facial features. For example, baby-faced adults tend to be over represented in "women's work" jobs, and baby-faced military officers tend to be weeded out early. Such results are probably due to a combination of the person's free choices and a selection process based on the decisions (biases) of others. This kind of evidence is consistent with the theory that facial appearances, interacting with social factors, cause traits to develop, perhaps following a self-fulfilling prophecy effect, or a self-defeating prophecy effect, and she discusses evidence that supports such causal links. One valid relationship, for example, is between baby-facedness and the Big Five trait of agreeableness. She also discusses the possibility that traits produce facial appearances.

Comments

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

oh, I've taken several IATs. What do you think of them?

[brianfey.livejournal.com]

I didn't finish them. I got bored.