Hey, Good Lookin’… You Must Be A Mormon!

Strange as it may seem, you can tell the the religious from the non-religious simply by looking at their photos. True, it’s only a little better than chance, but it’s a still an intriguing fact. Maybe, as this woman believes, people really can see the holy spirit glowing from within:

I ran into the TA whom I asked to speak on the Holy Ghost for my baptism. I was very excited to see him. There was this sense of ‘‘glow’’ from him, which I heard about many times yet never understood, like a ‘‘Mormon Radar.’’ But I saw it for the first time and I finally understood what it is. It is the Spirit!

That fantastic quote, taken from a blog by a Mormon woman, appears in a new paper by Nicholas Rule, from the University of Toronto, and colleagues.

This same team has previously shown that people can pick out Mormons from Christians by looking at photos taken from online personal ads. They only chose ads from people who specified that they were either Mormon or a member of some other religious organisation. So all these people took religion seriously enough to use it as a hook to catch a potential partner.

Only Image F (with eyes and mouth blanked) is needed to
pick out Mormons from non-Mormons

Using the photos from these ads, they set out to try to find out what it was that enabled their student raters to pick out the Mormons from the non-Mormons. It turns out that they were just as good at it if you turned the faces upside down, or if you blanked out the eyes and the mouth (both of which make it difficult to detect emotion).

In fact, they then discovered that the raters seemed to be detecting the Mormons based on facial shape and skin tone. And that, in turn, suggests that what they were actually doing was picking out the healthiest-looking:

Both skin and facial structure, via adiposity, have been found important in the accurate perception of individuals’ health. Given that Mormons and non-Mormons are known to significantly differ in their levels of health, it therefore seemed possible that differences in health may serve as the basis for perceivers’ Mormon/non-Mormon categorizations

They went on to show that they Mormons were indeed rated as healthier, and that this rating seemed to drive the rater’s perception of their spirituality. The strange thing was that the raters didn’t realise this. They did believe that Mormons were healthier, but they didn’t believe that’s was the visual cue they were using to detect them!

Mormons are thought to be healthier at least partly because they lead a more abstemious life. In fact, there was a study out just last week showing that sleep deprivation can have a measurable effect on appearance.

Does something similar explain why people can pick out the religious and non-religious from photos? Well, there was a study last year which showed that, in the US, the religious were not rated as being healthier. In fact, it showed that, although people thought they were picking out the religious based on their healthiness, in fact they were not.

So, the complete opposite of this new study then. Oh well, back to the drawing board!

Rule NO, Garrett JV, & Ambady N (2010). On the perception of religious group membership from faces. PloS one, 5 (12) PMID: 21151864