Got A Wide Face? You're Making Everything Terrible

Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - 16:30 in Psychology & Sociology

Wide Face Courtesy UC Riverside A new study says people act more selfishly when dealing with wide-faced men. Man, it's a tough time to be a big-faced dude. Last year, two management professors at the University of California, Riverside found that men with wider faces were more likely to cheat and lie for financial gain. Now, their latest study finds that the selfishness of wide-faced men is a self-fulfilling social prophesy: People perceive men with wider faces as more aggressive and less trustworthy, so they act more selfishly toward them, eliciting selfish behavior in return, the researchers say. The study consisted of multiple experiments with more than 100 participants in each. First, the researchers found men with wider faces were more likely to be selfish when allocating resources between them and a partner. In another study, participants were shown a picture of their partner in this same resource-allocation task--some saw...

Read the whole article on PopSci

More from PopSci

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net