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I strongly agree with the author that "face-ism" is a highly overlooked issue that needs to be dealt with. People treat other people differently on the basis o

I strongly agree with the author that "face-ism" is a highly overlooked issue that needs to be dealt with. People treat other people differently on the basis of what their face looks like, and it gets tiring. (Although I'm not one to judge, as I've found I'm not immune to the phenomenon myself. For instance, my initial impulse is to regard people who have a "bro" or "frat" face with contempt before realizing how irrational that is.) I almost feel like people begin to act how others expect them to act on the basis of their face; their personality is shaped as a response to the stimulus of other people's interactions with them. Someone who has a "friendly" face is going to be picked first in sports, is going to be talked to first out of a group of strangers, etc., and this creates a feedback loop where these people actually do become friendly, talkative, and outgoing. Likewise, those with "antisocial, don't-talk-to-me" faces are going to be ignored or treated standoffishly, and this too creates a feedback loop where these people assume since no one wants to interact with them, they will just stay by themselves instead. It's frustrating.

fchollet 12y ago
Does every aspect of spontaneous human thought need to be given a -ism name and be tagged as a sin? "Face-ism" is essentially pattern-matching, which is the way cognition operates on a fundamental level. Cognition is about finding statistical regularities in perception data, then using these regularities to make predictions about the future. So, on a completely unconscious level, you are using your memory of thousands of past experiences with people you know to predict a stranger's characteristics based on their appearance (among many other things). Sometimes, the generalization does not work and your unconscious predictions turn out to be mistaken. The only way not to make mistakes is not to think. And for that, you would have to turn your brain off entirely, since these thoughts are not occurring at a conscious, rational level that you can deliberately police.
- presumeaway 12y ago
  Cognitionism! Yeah, it's silly. I think it's not too unlike calling everything "hacking." I "hacked" my eyesight by looking out the window for a minute at the end of every chapter, etc. I moved more and lost weight, brilliant body "hack." We like to use language to make concepts more or less appealing, and assign them ethical value, even if it's incorrect, or impossible.
  - yzzxy 12y ago
    I hate this kind of thing. Hack should almost always mean subverting a system IMHO, except for less common definitions of the word (hack up, MIT hacking).
- ryanmonroe 12y ago
  If a subset of these inferences are shown to be wrong, wouldn't you want to make a conscious effort to stop making them? It would seem that becoming less biased in your evaluation of people would benefit both you and those you're evaluating.
  - lhnz 12y ago
    Conscious inference isn't always less wrong than unconscious inference. And it's likely that a subset of all perceptions might always be found to not match reality. High availability consciousness would probably require artificial intelligence, and even then there's simply too much data for us to be conscious of everything at all times.
    - 001sky 12y ago
      Consciousness is bandwidth constrained. Subconscious is very lite computationally. In the context of scarce resources, it's better to have a calculation from the subconscious rather than to wait in line for a week to use the mainframe.
  - ams6110 12y ago
    These inferences are developed over millenia of evolution. They are probably not wrong. Being able to judge trustworthiness, aggression, etc. based on a quick assesment of face is valuable for survival.
    - tashi 12y ago
      An alternative theory is that we have evolved just to be good at distinguishing changing facial expressions (and body language), especially within our own social groups. Using this skill to match people's expressions with their behavior over time would give us a tool for making good predictions. But if we then met a complete stranger or tribe whose face at rest, say purely through random variation of bone structure, happened to look more aggressive or happier or more sneaky than the resting faces of our friends, it would lead us to make biased and unjustified predictions.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  Finding statistical regularities based on irrelevant data, though, changes with fashion. The face you would trust in 1970 isn't the face you'd trust now, isn't the face you'd trust in the 40s. Whether you grew up in Chicago or Dallas, Germany or India makes a difference. Your race and views on race make a difference. It's important that we work to not be as stupid, and that we help others to not be as stupid as is natural, easy, and lazy.
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    > Finding statistical regularities based on irrelevant data, though, changes with fashion. The face you would trust in 1970 isn't the face you'd trust now, isn't the face you'd trust in the 40s. Whether you grew up in Chicago or Dallas, Germany or India makes a difference. Your race and views on race make a difference. Does it? I can't find any mention of this in the article.
    - pessimizer 12y ago
      It's both obviously true at the most trivial inspection and mentioned multiple times in the article. ---- "People tend to draw inferences about personality characteristics, above and beyond what we might assume based on things like gender, ethnicity, or expression. Social attributions from faces alone tend to be constructed from how common facial features are within a culture, cross-cultural norms (e.g., inferences on masculinity/femininity), and idiosyncrasies like resemblance to friends, colleagues, loved ones, and, importantly, ourselves. Olivola's research has shown that these facial attributions people make have serious implications for how people are treated, and their outcomes in life. The especially unfortunate part of these inferences is how heavily they factor into critical decisions, in lieu of actual facts. "'The fact that social decisions are influenced by facial morphology would be less troubling if it were a strong and reliable indicator of people’s underlying traits,' the researchers write in today's article. 'Unfortunately, careful consideration of the evidence suggests that it is not.'" ----- "Olivola has also done studies that show in conservative-leaning states, finding that the more 'traditionally Republican' a person's face is deemed to look, the more votes he/she gets. Even if they're a Democrat. And the correlation between facial competence and vote share is strongest among voters who are lacking in political knowledge."
- snogglethorpe 12y ago
  The thing is though, in many cases, these correlations are not based on long personal experience, they're "imported" from other sources (parents, friends, media, etc)... and that process is crazily lossy...
- bjourne 12y ago
  Pretty sure he used the word faceism to highlight that the behavior is essentially the same as racism. Your idea about generalizing knowledge based on past experiences gives to much credit to the human thought process. People are happy to think whatever the people around them think and then, after they have already picked their position, come up with arguments supporting that position.
- logicchains 12y ago
  If anyone's interested in reading more about this, the [pseudo]science of determining personality based on a person's face is termed 'Physiognomy'. There seems to be little convincing evidence to support its efficacy. The most compelling, if anecdotal, example listed on Wikipedia is: A physiognomist named Yoshito Mizuno was employed from 1936 to 1945 by the Imperial Japanese Naval Aeronautics Department, examining candidates for the Naval Air Corps, after - to their surprise - Admiral Yamamoto's staff discovered that he could predict with over 80% accuracy the qualifications of candidates to become successful pilots.
- emotionalcode 12y ago
  You can also get in the habit of questioning every thought you have. Which is somewhat madness, and can be a very hard habit to break. Making decisions and choices is a tediously slow and cautious process. Building methods of thinking without deconstructing them before they are built, is also very difficult. You don't have to not think, you just have to be skeptical of your own thoughts. It's not perfect, but neither is the process of building a sequence of associative correlations and calling it common sense.
- paulojreis 12y ago
  > "Face-ism" is essentially pattern-matching, which is the way cognition operates on a fundamental level. (...) Cognition is about finding statistical regularities in perception data, then using these regularities to make predictions about the future I'm sorry, but don't you think that you're maybe oversimplifying cognition and the human mind, at large? I can't believe that "face-ism" is essentially pattern-matching - certainly a big chunk of the process is "hard-wired" and not based on pattern-matching. I can see the "appeal", mostly in CS people, to "reduce" cognition (to something "doable" with a computer). But overzealous simplifications are detrimental to knowledge.
  - delluminatus 12y ago
    So are unnecessary complications, or trying to maintain a mystical shroud of fundamental complexity around what is essentially an extremely sophisticated structure of very simple parts. I like your use of scare quotes around "reducing" cognition, as though it's irreducible. I'm not sure why people persist in claiming that their brains are the only things in the world that we can't come to understand as a system of simple parts.
    - paulojreis 12y ago
      > So are unnecessary complications, or trying to maintain a mystical shroud of fundamental complexity around what is essentially an extremely sophisticated structure of very simple parts. How can you be sure of that? What if they are complex? Or if only one or two of the parts are extremely complicated? How simple a "part" has to be, in order to be "very simple"? What about the role of the other systems that are part of the same "macrosystem" (the organism)? You can certainly model and, in a way, predict a neuron firing pattern. You can't, however, predict how will my day change if a beautiful stranger smiles at me during my morning commute (even if these reactions and changes are produced by "very simple parts"). There's no mystical shroud here; just acknowledging that emergent behavior is complex. > I like your use of scare quotes around "reducing" cognition, as though it's irreducible. Don't get me wrong: I don't believe it is irreducible. I just believe that a reductionist approach - or "isolating" simple parts - won't take us far in understanding it. "Organic" (I can't find a better word) systems aren't easily reducible to parts as an electronic or mechanic system. Even if they're made of very simple parts, making sense of the emergent behavior they produce is hard. > I'm not sure why people persist in claiming that their brains are the only things in the world that we can't come to understand as a system of simple parts. No such claim was made here. We may come to understand "the brains" as a system of simple parts. However, we're not sure of that; acting as if it was a sure-thing is faith, not so much different from religious faith.
NathanCH 12y ago
> I strongly agree with the author that "face-ism" is a highly overlooked issue that needs to be dealt with. I don't disagree, but is this something we can deal with? It seems more biological and evolutionary than anything. We want to associate ourselves with people who appear happy and trust worthy, even for superficial reasons. It's quick (apparently effective) and it's in our best interest. I'd love if someone could back me up on this because I have no evidence, but from what I've seen, society is becoming increasingly shallow. Men and women are held to such high standards of beauty, and I don't think this is merely the result of excellent marketing by fashion magazines and affluent lifestyles. The images portrayed in pop-culture are a reflection of what we want to see - the free market has simply capitalized on it.
- conistonwater 12y ago
  > I don't disagree, but is this something we can deal with? It is unfair to those people that it affects negatively, which is a good enough reason to deal with it, even if people that are affected by it positively don't really mind.
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    The question is, how?
    - 1123581321 12y ago
      There are two methods, an old one and a new one. The old one is to spend more time with fewer people. The new one is to know more about new people as soon as you meet them. This is one of the goals of projects like Google Glass.
      - jiggy2011 12y ago
        How would google glass know whether somebody was trustworthy or not?
        12y ago
bros_are_people 12y ago
> For instance, my initial impulse is to regard people who have a "bro" or "frat" face with contempt before realizing how irrational that is. I find this interesting. Do graduates seriously continue to resent people who were in fraternities that much? One would think these kinds of stereotypes didn't matter much after college. Until I started reading HN, I wasn't aware that this kind of deep-seeded hatred existed. I see a lot of people using "bro-" as a negative prefix meaning "not adequate". This bothers me as someone who spent college loving CS and programming while very much participating in fraternity culture. EDIT: I'm an introvert; I'm just not really shy. I do sometimes feel like I can't get along with other programmers for some reason.
- Xcelerate 12y ago
  Well, I'm still in grad school, so I see and interact with them occasionally. My experience is that many have a cliquish attitude, where if you're not passionately into watching football and drinking beer then you're "some weird quiet person" who is treated with disdain. Many are not like this, but I've had too many bad interactions that I've developed an association in my mind -- one which I try to ignore until I get to know each person individually.
  - bros_are_people 12y ago
    Thanks for the response. I definitely see where you're coming from. I do feel like there is a flip side to that where if you're into fantasy football and drinking on weekends you're somehow less intelligent. This is evident in terms like "brogrammer" or "bro-science" I see get tossed around HN. I doubt much of the "bro" culture stays internalized for very long after graduation. Most of it just translates to severe immaturity in the adult world. Still, there's danger in stereotype-based hatred.
    - thisGuysAccount 12y ago
      I agree with you that 'brogrammer' is saying something with the connotation that the brogrammer is less mature, less intelligent, less competent maybe. Bro-science, though, is something else. It's the kind of thing that's based on anecdotes and passed off as science. It's sciencey. Things like "Bro, if you eat ground deer antler before you work out, you get huge gains! The guys at the bodybuilding show did it." It's more obvious in sports, but I've seen it in CS and business as well. There, it's in terms of "we did X, X worked, X is the best way to do it." without comparing X to other methods of implementation. There are bonus bro-science points if other methods are scorned without consideration.
clairity 12y ago
> Someone who has a "friendly" face is going to be picked first in sports... this is not true if you're at all playing competitively. you pick the best players first. which gets at the limits of this kind of bias--that a consideration of relevant indicators, once known, can overwhelm facial bias. it doesn't have to be destiny.
spacehome 12y ago
Yea, but maybe the causation works both ways. There's a lot we don't know about hormones. They're causes and effects of brain activity, and they probably influence muscle and fat on the face. Aggressive men have a certain "look" in the face, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is caused by lots of testosterone. Edit: Or some people smile or laugh or frown or look intensely more than others.
novaleaf 12y ago
can be applied to yourself to seem more trustworthy/social: just "keep your eyes wide open and smile"

fchollet 12y ago

Does every aspect of spontaneous human thought need to be given a -ism name and be tagged as a sin? "Face-ism" is essentially pattern-matching, which is the way cognition operates on a fundamental level. Cognition is about finding statistical regularities in perception data, then using these regularities to make predictions about the future. So, on a completely unconscious level, you are using your memory of thousands of past experiences with people you know to predict a stranger's characteristics based on their appearance (among many other things). Sometimes, the generalization does not work and your unconscious predictions turn out to be mistaken. The only way not to make mistakes is not to think. And for that, you would have to turn your brain off entirely, since these thoughts are not occurring at a conscious, rational level that you can deliberately police.

presumeaway 12y ago
Cognitionism! Yeah, it's silly. I think it's not too unlike calling everything "hacking." I "hacked" my eyesight by looking out the window for a minute at the end of every chapter, etc. I moved more and lost weight, brilliant body "hack." We like to use language to make concepts more or less appealing, and assign them ethical value, even if it's incorrect, or impossible.
- yzzxy 12y ago
  I hate this kind of thing. Hack should almost always mean subverting a system IMHO, except for less common definitions of the word (hack up, MIT hacking).
ryanmonroe 12y ago
If a subset of these inferences are shown to be wrong, wouldn't you want to make a conscious effort to stop making them? It would seem that becoming less biased in your evaluation of people would benefit both you and those you're evaluating.
- lhnz 12y ago
  Conscious inference isn't always less wrong than unconscious inference. And it's likely that a subset of all perceptions might always be found to not match reality. High availability consciousness would probably require artificial intelligence, and even then there's simply too much data for us to be conscious of everything at all times.
  - 001sky 12y ago
    Consciousness is bandwidth constrained. Subconscious is very lite computationally. In the context of scarce resources, it's better to have a calculation from the subconscious rather than to wait in line for a week to use the mainframe.
- ams6110 12y ago
  These inferences are developed over millenia of evolution. They are probably not wrong. Being able to judge trustworthiness, aggression, etc. based on a quick assesment of face is valuable for survival.
  - tashi 12y ago
    An alternative theory is that we have evolved just to be good at distinguishing changing facial expressions (and body language), especially within our own social groups. Using this skill to match people's expressions with their behavior over time would give us a tool for making good predictions. But if we then met a complete stranger or tribe whose face at rest, say purely through random variation of bone structure, happened to look more aggressive or happier or more sneaky than the resting faces of our friends, it would lead us to make biased and unjustified predictions.
pessimizer 12y ago
Finding statistical regularities based on irrelevant data, though, changes with fashion. The face you would trust in 1970 isn't the face you'd trust now, isn't the face you'd trust in the 40s. Whether you grew up in Chicago or Dallas, Germany or India makes a difference. Your race and views on race make a difference. It's important that we work to not be as stupid, and that we help others to not be as stupid as is natural, easy, and lazy.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  > Finding statistical regularities based on irrelevant data, though, changes with fashion. The face you would trust in 1970 isn't the face you'd trust now, isn't the face you'd trust in the 40s. Whether you grew up in Chicago or Dallas, Germany or India makes a difference. Your race and views on race make a difference. Does it? I can't find any mention of this in the article.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    It's both obviously true at the most trivial inspection and mentioned multiple times in the article. ---- "People tend to draw inferences about personality characteristics, above and beyond what we might assume based on things like gender, ethnicity, or expression. Social attributions from faces alone tend to be constructed from how common facial features are within a culture, cross-cultural norms (e.g., inferences on masculinity/femininity), and idiosyncrasies like resemblance to friends, colleagues, loved ones, and, importantly, ourselves. Olivola's research has shown that these facial attributions people make have serious implications for how people are treated, and their outcomes in life. The especially unfortunate part of these inferences is how heavily they factor into critical decisions, in lieu of actual facts. "'The fact that social decisions are influenced by facial morphology would be less troubling if it were a strong and reliable indicator of people’s underlying traits,' the researchers write in today's article. 'Unfortunately, careful consideration of the evidence suggests that it is not.'" ----- "Olivola has also done studies that show in conservative-leaning states, finding that the more 'traditionally Republican' a person's face is deemed to look, the more votes he/she gets. Even if they're a Democrat. And the correlation between facial competence and vote share is strongest among voters who are lacking in political knowledge."
snogglethorpe 12y ago
The thing is though, in many cases, these correlations are not based on long personal experience, they're "imported" from other sources (parents, friends, media, etc)... and that process is crazily lossy...
bjourne 12y ago
Pretty sure he used the word faceism to highlight that the behavior is essentially the same as racism. Your idea about generalizing knowledge based on past experiences gives to much credit to the human thought process. People are happy to think whatever the people around them think and then, after they have already picked their position, come up with arguments supporting that position.
logicchains 12y ago
If anyone's interested in reading more about this, the [pseudo]science of determining personality based on a person's face is termed 'Physiognomy'. There seems to be little convincing evidence to support its efficacy. The most compelling, if anecdotal, example listed on Wikipedia is: A physiognomist named Yoshito Mizuno was employed from 1936 to 1945 by the Imperial Japanese Naval Aeronautics Department, examining candidates for the Naval Air Corps, after - to their surprise - Admiral Yamamoto's staff discovered that he could predict with over 80% accuracy the qualifications of candidates to become successful pilots.
emotionalcode 12y ago
You can also get in the habit of questioning every thought you have. Which is somewhat madness, and can be a very hard habit to break. Making decisions and choices is a tediously slow and cautious process. Building methods of thinking without deconstructing them before they are built, is also very difficult. You don't have to not think, you just have to be skeptical of your own thoughts. It's not perfect, but neither is the process of building a sequence of associative correlations and calling it common sense.
paulojreis 12y ago
> "Face-ism" is essentially pattern-matching, which is the way cognition operates on a fundamental level. (...) Cognition is about finding statistical regularities in perception data, then using these regularities to make predictions about the future I'm sorry, but don't you think that you're maybe oversimplifying cognition and the human mind, at large? I can't believe that "face-ism" is essentially pattern-matching - certainly a big chunk of the process is "hard-wired" and not based on pattern-matching. I can see the "appeal", mostly in CS people, to "reduce" cognition (to something "doable" with a computer). But overzealous simplifications are detrimental to knowledge.
- delluminatus 12y ago
  So are unnecessary complications, or trying to maintain a mystical shroud of fundamental complexity around what is essentially an extremely sophisticated structure of very simple parts. I like your use of scare quotes around "reducing" cognition, as though it's irreducible. I'm not sure why people persist in claiming that their brains are the only things in the world that we can't come to understand as a system of simple parts.
  - paulojreis 12y ago
    > So are unnecessary complications, or trying to maintain a mystical shroud of fundamental complexity around what is essentially an extremely sophisticated structure of very simple parts. How can you be sure of that? What if they are complex? Or if only one or two of the parts are extremely complicated? How simple a "part" has to be, in order to be "very simple"? What about the role of the other systems that are part of the same "macrosystem" (the organism)? You can certainly model and, in a way, predict a neuron firing pattern. You can't, however, predict how will my day change if a beautiful stranger smiles at me during my morning commute (even if these reactions and changes are produced by "very simple parts"). There's no mystical shroud here; just acknowledging that emergent behavior is complex. > I like your use of scare quotes around "reducing" cognition, as though it's irreducible. Don't get me wrong: I don't believe it is irreducible. I just believe that a reductionist approach - or "isolating" simple parts - won't take us far in understanding it. "Organic" (I can't find a better word) systems aren't easily reducible to parts as an electronic or mechanic system. Even if they're made of very simple parts, making sense of the emergent behavior they produce is hard. > I'm not sure why people persist in claiming that their brains are the only things in the world that we can't come to understand as a system of simple parts. No such claim was made here. We may come to understand "the brains" as a system of simple parts. However, we're not sure of that; acting as if it was a sure-thing is faith, not so much different from religious faith.

NathanCH 12y ago

> I strongly agree with the author that "face-ism" is a highly overlooked issue that needs to be dealt with. I don't disagree, but is this something we can deal with? It seems more biological and evolutionary than anything. We want to associate ourselves with people who appear happy and trust worthy, even for superficial reasons. It's quick (apparently effective) and it's in our best interest. I'd love if someone could back me up on this because I have no evidence, but from what I've seen, society is becoming increasingly shallow. Men and women are held to such high standards of beauty, and I don't think this is merely the result of excellent marketing by fashion magazines and affluent lifestyles. The images portrayed in pop-culture are a reflection of what we want to see - the free market has simply capitalized on it.

conistonwater 12y ago
> I don't disagree, but is this something we can deal with? It is unfair to those people that it affects negatively, which is a good enough reason to deal with it, even if people that are affected by it positively don't really mind.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  The question is, how?
  - 1123581321 12y ago
    There are two methods, an old one and a new one. The old one is to spend more time with fewer people. The new one is to know more about new people as soon as you meet them. This is one of the goals of projects like Google Glass.
    - jiggy2011 12y ago
      How would google glass know whether somebody was trustworthy or not?
      - 12y ago

bros_are_people 12y ago

> For instance, my initial impulse is to regard people who have a "bro" or "frat" face with contempt before realizing how irrational that is. I find this interesting. Do graduates seriously continue to resent people who were in fraternities that much? One would think these kinds of stereotypes didn't matter much after college. Until I started reading HN, I wasn't aware that this kind of deep-seeded hatred existed. I see a lot of people using "bro-" as a negative prefix meaning "not adequate". This bothers me as someone who spent college loving CS and programming while very much participating in fraternity culture. EDIT: I'm an introvert; I'm just not really shy. I do sometimes feel like I can't get along with other programmers for some reason.

Xcelerate 12y ago
Well, I'm still in grad school, so I see and interact with them occasionally. My experience is that many have a cliquish attitude, where if you're not passionately into watching football and drinking beer then you're "some weird quiet person" who is treated with disdain. Many are not like this, but I've had too many bad interactions that I've developed an association in my mind -- one which I try to ignore until I get to know each person individually.
- bros_are_people 12y ago
  Thanks for the response. I definitely see where you're coming from. I do feel like there is a flip side to that where if you're into fantasy football and drinking on weekends you're somehow less intelligent. This is evident in terms like "brogrammer" or "bro-science" I see get tossed around HN. I doubt much of the "bro" culture stays internalized for very long after graduation. Most of it just translates to severe immaturity in the adult world. Still, there's danger in stereotype-based hatred.
  - thisGuysAccount 12y ago
    I agree with you that 'brogrammer' is saying something with the connotation that the brogrammer is less mature, less intelligent, less competent maybe. Bro-science, though, is something else. It's the kind of thing that's based on anecdotes and passed off as science. It's sciencey. Things like "Bro, if you eat ground deer antler before you work out, you get huge gains! The guys at the bodybuilding show did it." It's more obvious in sports, but I've seen it in CS and business as well. There, it's in terms of "we did X, X worked, X is the best way to do it." without comparing X to other methods of implementation. There are bonus bro-science points if other methods are scorned without consideration.

clairity 12y ago

> Someone who has a "friendly" face is going to be picked first in sports... this is not true if you're at all playing competitively. you pick the best players first. which gets at the limits of this kind of bias--that a consideration of relevant indicators, once known, can overwhelm facial bias. it doesn't have to be destiny.

spacehome 12y ago

Yea, but maybe the causation works both ways. There's a lot we don't know about hormones. They're causes and effects of brain activity, and they probably influence muscle and fat on the face. Aggressive men have a certain "look" in the face, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is caused by lots of testosterone. Edit: Or some people smile or laugh or frown or look intensely more than others.

novaleaf 12y ago

can be applied to yourself to seem more trustworthy/social: just "keep your eyes wide open and smile"