Face value

You can pluck it, stretch it, encourage the growth of dense hair on it. You can harness the full firepower of modern cosmetic surgery. But -- as Brandeis University psychologist Leslie Zebrowitz points out in her new book -- you can't escape your face.

interview by Ellen Barry

We like to pretend that the face is not vital. Appearances are said to be deceiving. Another pretty face is always preceded by just. Handsome is as handsome does. All this denial points to only one conclusion: despite the best efforts of a determined society, our faces still have the power to make or break us.

Brandeis University psychologist Leslie Zebrowitz opens her new book, Reading Faces: Window to the Soul?, with the odd fact that Charles Darwin was nearly turned away by the captain of the Beagle because, as Darwin recalled, "he doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage." We got evolutionary theory anyway, but -- as Zebrowitz's work demonstrates -- the 20th century has not improved the situation of the man with the wrong nose.

Zebrowitz's book confirms that our faces matter as much as we suspect. Sometimes they matter more. For one thing, social spoils go to the beautiful -- or, as the author puts it, "not only are attractive individuals viewed as more influential than their unattractive peers, but those perceptions are accurate." It's grim stuff; Zebrowitz cites one study of mothers' reactions to their babies, and comes to the conclusion that "the cuter infants are perceived to be by others, the more their own mothers smile at a photograph of them." So much for mother love.

Reading Faces doesn't contain many surprises. Often, thunderingly obvious human reactions reappear under names like the "Attractiveness Halo Effect" and the "Babyface Overgeneralization Effect," as if clinical language could make us less shallow. But the book is full of strange and fascinating information:

One of the hidden costs of beauty is that "the healthy appearance of attractive people may lead doctors to provide less treatment than their condition warrants."

People like faces better when they are viewed in a familiar way. So while individuals prefer their own faces reversed, the way they see it in the mirror, their close friends prefer photographic images of them.

The attractive face is average. A study of facial composites showed that when 32 faces were superimposed by a computer program, the resulting "average" face was considered more attractive than a similar four-face composite.

Zebrowitz's most original work concentrates on the plight of the "baby-faced," or people with the perpendicular foreheads, large eyes, thin eyebrows, and small jaws associated with infants. Baby faces are associated with childlike attributes such as naïveté and honesty, and baby-faced adults are treated accordingly. In a study of more than 500 cases in small-claims court, Zebrowitz found that people with baby faces were found guilty of intentional fault only 45 percent of the time, whereas people with very mature faces were found guilty 92 percent of the time. This dynamic can also play out in the political arena -- whereas the mature-faced Gary Hart was brought down by philandering, the baby-faced Bill Clinton has emerged from infidelity accusations intact.

Revelations like these, presented in the grave language of social science, offer a social anatomy of a portion of the body so close that we rarely even think about it. And ultimately, what Zebrowitz does reveal -- and what will stay with you as you take your face out into the world -- is how much bone structure determines about one's future. It will chasten you. It will make you peer closely in the mirror. It will make you wish you had worn your retainer.

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Q: Most of your book is about appearance influencing social outcomes, but you also talk about the "Dorian Gray effect" and other ways that personality can actually influence appearance. How convinced are you that this is true?

A: Novelists write interesting stuff about it, but there's not much research. I did some research where I found that when [average-looking] women early in adulthood had a personality that was more stereotypical of an attractive person -- they were more sociable -- that predicted them becoming more attractive [relative to other women] when they were in their late 50s and early 60s. So in a sense it's not a Dorian Gray, but very sociable people became more attractive. We tried to figure out what it was that was doing this -- did they have more smile lines, for instance? -- and it was that they wore more makeup.

So when you find a correlation between appearance and personality, the causal link could go either way. It could be that personality influences appearance, or it could be that appearance influences social outcomes, which influence personality. You could get a little more far-out and speculate on some genetic links between appearance and personality.

Q:That's getting into sort of radical territory.

A: That's a little politically incorrect to talk about.

Q:Because what you're saying is that your appearance is yourself.

A: [Appearance] is a marker. So at the extremes we can acknowledge that it's true. Someone with Down syndrome has certain traits -- intellectual traits and also personality traits -- and a distinctive appearance. There might also be things that are true in less extreme cases.

Q:Did you find particular things in your research that were big surprises?

A: The self-fulfilling-prophecy notion was very popular among social psychologists, and I kind of expected that if there was ever a link between appearance and personality, it would take that form -- that people would end up behaving the way they were expected to behave. But some of my most recent research suggests something that you could call the "self-defeating prophecy." What I've been finding is that there's a baby-face stereotype. Baby-faced people are seen as sort of childlike, submissive, warm and affectionate, naive.

Well, adolescent baby-faced boys are anything but. They seem to be just the opposite. They are more hostile, more assertive than mature-faced boys. It's not just that there's no difference -- they're the opposite. Also, there's evidence that rather than being intellectually incompetent, they show higher educational achievement than the mature-faced. We've been trying to figure out what's going on; they seem to be more highly motivated. What you might call a Napoleon effect. They're overcompensating. An adolescent boy does not like to be seen as warm and cuddly, not at that age. So there we found a reversal of what people were expecting.

Q: One thing that was interesting to me was the distinction between men and women in terms of compensation for unattractiveness. Explain why they react differently.

A: We found some evidence for the self-fulfilling-prophecy effect for men. Men who were attractive early in adulthood came to have a personality later on that was more like the stereotype -- which is more socially oriented. We didn't find that [correlation] for women, and I thought maybe that's because there are two effects going on at the same time. Whereas a self-fulfilling prophecy might be working for the attractive women, the unattractive women might be having a compensation effect.

Q:But the unattractive men did not.

A: They might not bother to. Right. Because the social norms are such that being attractive is more of an issue for women, whereas being baby-faced is more of a social issue for men, so maybe that's where they would compensate.

Q:I've always been interested in attitudes toward plastic surgery. There are definitely some people who think your face is so deeply intertwined with what you are that you should not change it. Have you found that?

A: I teach this freshman seminar where we talk about the negative effects of having your face look a certain way. At the end of the class I say: "Well, all right, I read a science-fiction story once where everyone had the same face. How would you feel about a world where everyone has the same face?" And they're horrified at the suggestion, because they feel that the face is the person. It is the identity. And I think that accounts for a lot of what goes on in the research I've been doing. We judge people by the face. We feel it says something about who they are.

Q:Is it appropriate?

A: I think it's often inappropriate, because I think it's misleading. I think there might be some truth to it, though, and we have to figure it out. There might be more truth in dynamic cues than in structural cues. The way you move your face is under your control and may say more about you than the shape of your jaw.

Q:Say your appearance changes radically during adolescence. Are you already hard-wired?

A: The fact is that the way you feel about yourself accounts for about as much of the variance [in behavior] as the way other people see you, so people who feel attractive can end up showing the kind of social behaviors shown by those whom other people find attractive. So in the book, I talk about what parents can do, what society can do. If someone feels good about their appearance, that's probably as good as really being beautiful.

Q:Really?

A: Well, it might not compensate for an extreme deformity. But most people are pretty average. They aren't great beauties, they aren't horribly ugly.

Q:There's a question mark at the end of your subtitle. Is the face the window to the soul?

A: I guess I would say the face is not totally undiagnostic of a person's personality, but it can mislead us. I argue in the book that this tendency to judge character from appearance may derive from the information that faces really do provide. It's important to pay attention to the facial qualities that tell us who's a baby and who's an adult. It has evolutionary value. It has social value. And it might be so important that we respond to the key babyish features even when they're appearing in someone who's not a baby. We overgeneralize.

Q:Have you found that you look at people's faces differently now, after all this study?

A: I think I'm more cautious than I was. I'm more aware. I knew that I would meet someone and I would have an impression of them -- whether I liked them, whether they were trustworthy. I knew enough to know that [the assumptions] would probably be faulty. But I wanted to know where they came from and what was guiding them. Why do I have these impressions? And then maybe I could control it.

Q:But the research pulls in two different directions -- yes, you can judge a book by its cover, and no, you can't.

A: What it really says is, sometimes you can, but often you can't. You can't be sure, at least given the current state of knowledge. The bottom line is, you're going to have impressions, and you better mistrust them.

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.