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We make snap judgments of others based not only on their facial appearance, but also on our pre-existing beliefs about how others' personalities work, finds a new study by a team of psychology researchers. Its work, reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , underscores how we interpret others' facial features to form impressions of their personalities. Initial impressions of faces can bias how we interact and make critical decisions about people, and so understanding the mechanisms behind these impressions is important for developing techniques to reduce biases based on facial features that typically operate outside of awareness. We have long known that people make some personality impressions of others based merely upon their facial appearance. For instance, we see those with babyish features as agreeable and harmless and those with faces that resemble anger as dishonest and unfriendly.

Find out how our experiment worked, and see the results. THE history of science could have been so different. It was most famously popularised in the late 18th century by the Swiss poet Johann Lavater, whose ideas became a talking point in intellectual circles. It was only after the subject became associated with phrenology, which fell into disrepute in the late 19th century, that physiognomy was written off as pseudoscience.