There’s a deeply-rooted, incredibly superficial aspect of human nature that is rarely discussed: our obsession with small variations in bone structure/skin smoothness on a person’s face. At extremes, people are desired or shunned due to tiny, otherwise almost meaningless facial details.
In the attached image, there are two non-existent women (generated by a face generation AI set to generate “brown hair white adult female”). If these were real people, they would likely be treated differently throughout their lives due to very minor differences in facial structure and skin smoothness.
Based on their faces alone, there’s no way to know with non-negligible accuracy which of these people (if they existed) would be more hard-working, more moral, wiser, or otherwise in possession of personal traits that we actually might care about. So why are humans so obsessed with faces? It seems likely to be caused by a combination of two factors:
(1) Runaway Sexual Selection
If peacocks find large tail plumage sexually attractive, then even if those feathers are not useful for anything else, that still creates an evolutionary selection pressure where those with larger tail plumage are more likely to pass on their genes (due to improved chances of mating). Similarly, if certain humans are found to be more attractive based on their faces, that creates an evolutionary selection pressure in favor of mating with those people because then their children have a higher probability of finding mating success themselves (and hence passing on their genes). This phenomenon reinforces faces being attractive (because those attracted to “good-looking” faces mate with “good-looking” people more often, therefore their children are more good-looking and so have an easier time mating, plus have a preference for “good-looking” faces).
Today, this selection pressure is likely much weaker than it once was since most people now end up having children. For instance, now the vast majority of people in the US live to be at least 50, and only about 15% of women and 25% of men in the 40-50-year age bracket are childless. In contrast, tens of thousands of years ago, far fewer would make it to the point where they would have children.
(2) Health Correlations
In the environment we lived in tens of thousands of years ago, some aspects of a person’s face correlated with the likelihood of the survival of their genes, in particular ones related to disease (some diseases impact the face), genetic disorders (some of them cause facial changes), and development in the womb (where abnormal development can cause facial changes).
The correlation between health and facial features is likely to be lower now than it used to be back then. Today, a person’s facial features might still help to predict someone’s age, their most probable gender identity, and whether they have certain health conditions – but, of course, none of these give us any legitimate justification for treating some people better and others worse based just on their face.
It has been found that certain facial features do correlate with hormone levels (like testosterone). While testosterone levels may play a role in aggression (they may be part of the explanation for why men are violent so much more often than women), using these small correlations to make judgments about any one person is going to be both highly inaccurate and highly unjust. Some other personality traits may also be very weakly correlated with a person’s facial features, but talking to the person for 20 minutes will, of course, give you dramatically more information about what that person is like. Yet, we are prone to read so much into the way a person looks.
Note: there is an additional effect when it comes to faces, which is that we are sometimes taught by our culture to value certain facial attributes more than others. This can act above and beyond the previously mentioned two factors.
We humans act as though faces are incredibly important despite them being a substantially arbitrary mask our genes have programmed for us. And they often impact how we humans treat each other, despite this unequal treatment being both unjust and unjustified. If you ever notice yourself treating someone less well because of their face, take note and adjust your behavior.
I am not saying that people should, for example, date people they are not attracted to. Obviously, attraction is an important part of relationships for most people, and the face is one part of what determines attraction. (You may also care about your children one day having attractive faces, so they can more easily find life partners they like.) Rather, what I’m saying is that we should be very wary about making negative inferences about any individual person based on their face (which is something that, unfortunately, the human mind seems to do often). The face says too little about a person’s character to be useful for predicting at the level of any individual.
This essay was first written on July 2, 2020, and first appeared on this site on December 17, 2021.
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