You have an interview for a job. A lot of applications, a lot of rejection letters, but now you have a chance at the job you really wanted. You're going. Pour a glass of water if you shake hands with the person who will decide your future.
You don't know that this doesn't matter.
After your interviewer looked at you, they decided that you were so incompetent and unreliable that you wouldn't get the job.
According to new research, they are one of a group of people who have a tendency to judge extreme personality traits from a quick look at a person's face.
Two faces are shown. Is it possible that you would hire these people? Who is smarter? Would you trust someone to keep an eye on your laptop while you're out of town?
Lisa DeBruine is a psychologist. Four different faces were combined to create these images.
Even though these faces aren't real, you can still make a judgement about each person's competency based on their facial expression and structure. This is done all the time by us. The people in the images are projected onto them.
Estimates of personality can be made using quick judgements about how much we should trust someone, how dominant they are, or how smart they are.
This can lead to people being stereotyped, for example, thinking that people with certain physical characteristics must be unreliable.
Some of us have a tendency to draw conclusions about others based on their facial appearance, according to recent research from Japan.
In a series of online studies, Atsunobu Suzuki and colleagues found face-based trait inferences. The subjects looked at someone's face and made a series of personality judgements.
They discovered that some people only make positive and negative judgements. Even though the age, sex, and ethnicity of participants were controlled, this still held.
Imagine seeing a face with hard eyes and masculine features and thinking the person is very dishonest. Someone with bigger eyes is incompetent. This is problematic according to Suzuki and colleagues.
There is unconscious bias when making decisions about new hires. The study sent different versions of the same CV to apply for different jobs.
The name on the CV was the same as that on the other. About half of the responses were from British people.
Alexander Todorov is one of the leading figures in first impression research. First impressions are hard to change. It's possible that the wrong people are being hired for jobs.
You don't know you're doing it most of the time. Some companies insist on unconscious bias training because some people refuse to do it.
Unconscious bias training isn't a cure for discrimination, but it can change people's attitudes.
unconscious bias training can be used to prejudice against other physical characteristics. Face-ism is a stereotype that crosses ethnicities and genders.
A solution could be to take a test similar to the Suzuki experiment and see if you exhibit extreme FBTIs.
Being aware of your biases can lead to a change of mindset in a short period of time, but people need extra interventions periodically to make any real behavior change last.
Making someone aware that they make extreme personality judgments based on facial appearance will likely pull the unconscious bias into the conscious.
You might be a victim of face-ism in the future if we can't try.
The department of psychology at Durham University has an associate professor named Paddy Ross.
Under a Creative Commons license, this article is re-posted. The original article is worth a read.
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