Death penalty ‘more likely’ for dodgy-looking men with harsher sentences
The death penalty or a long time behind bars is more likely for men who look shifty, a new study in America has found.
Racial and gender biases also strongly impact how trustworthy another person is judged, with facial stereotypes also playing a part, researchers say. The paper suggests downward-turned lips and a heavy brow can land criminals with harsher sentences.
The study from Columbia shows the results of four experiments with the help of 1,400 volunteers. They also discovered mock jurors were more likely to recommend a ruling against 'defendants' with a dishonest facial appearance. It also proved a similar reaction to everyday social interactions, as well as political decisions.
There are certain facial features that make you look more untrustworthy (APS/Columbia University)An associate professor of psychology who worked alongside Youngki Hong and Kao-Wei Chua spoke about the findings from the journal Psychological Science. Jon Freeman said: “These findings bolster prior work that facial stereotypes may have disastrous effects in the real world, but, more importantly, provide a potential inroad toward combating these sorts of biases.
"By exposing a cognitive pathway toward eradicating facial stereotypes, future research must investigate whether this training could be broadly applied and how to ensure the bias reduction persists over time. If there are consequential judgments that are biased by facial stereotypes, our findings suggest that they have the potential to be flexibly remapped and dismantled."
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The paper read: "Initial impressions of others based on facial appearances are often inaccurate yet can lead to dire outcomes. Across four studies, adult participants underwent a counterstereotype training to reduce their reliance on facial appearance in consequential social judgments of white male faces.
"In Studies 1 and 2, trustworthiness and sentencing judgments among control participants predicted whether real-world inmates were sentenced to death versus life in prison, but these relationships were diminished among trained participants. In Study 3, a sequential priming paradigm demonstrated that the training was able to abolish the relationship between even automatically and implicitly perceived trustworthiness and the inmates’ life-or-death sentences.
"Study 4 extended these results to realistic decision-making, showing that training reduced the impact of facial trustworthiness on sentencing decisions even in the presence of decision-relevant information. Overall, our findings suggest that a counterstereotype intervention can mitigate the potentially harmful effects of relying on facial appearance in consequential social judgments."
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