Given our obsession with celebrity culture, physical beauty may appear the greatest source of face-ism. Beginning as early as the 1990s, economist Daniel Hamermesh has found that more attractive people can earn 10 to 12% more – for professionals as diverse as American football players, lawyers, and even his fellow economists. “Which is a scary thought,” he says today. In fact, one of the only exceptions, he found, was armed robbers. “If he can scare you into giving you the money, he doesn’t need to use violence.” Indeed, as BBC Future has explored before, good looks aren’t always a golden ticket for the law-abiding, either. A woman considered to be more beautiful, for instance, may find it harder to get a top job if the interviewers thought it undermined her credibility.
In any case, our preoccupation with beauty may have caused us to neglect the many other forms of facial prejudice, as Olivola’s colleague Alexander Todorov at Princeton University found 10 years ago. He asked participants to look at photos of US politicians running for Congress and Senate for just one second and then to judge how “competent” they looked on a numerical scale. Even when he took into account other factors, such as age and attractiveness, the participants’ snap judgements predicted who would win a seat with nearly 70% accuracy.
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More recent studies have shown similar results, all examining how facial appearance feeds success, irrespective of your sex appeal. The more dominant you look, the more likely you are to be hired as a CEO – and the higher your pay packet, for example. In the military, meanwhile, scientists have asked people to judge faces of cadets for perceived dominance. Those with the higher ratings were more likely to climb the ranks later in life.
Honesty, in particular, is thought to show itself all over your face. When given a range of photos, participants mostly agree who looks more trustworthy – and they are more likely to lend that person money as a result. In court, an innocent face could even be your get-out-of-jail-free card; given the same evidence, people who look more trustworthy are less likely to be found guilty, one study found.