Prof Richard Wiseman <\/a> in the New Scientist in February this year (hey, I\u2019ve only just read it, OK?), this is a typical face of a religious person in the UK.<\/p>\nWhat they did was to ask readers to send in photos of themselves, along with a rating of their personality. They digitised the key features, and produced an average of each personality type. When other people were asked to guess the personality based on face alone, they were pretty accurate for religious women \u2013 73% got it right.<\/p>\n
There was lots of stuff in the article about why this might be (androgens or other genetic linkages, for example), but no mention of one blindingly obvious explanation.<\/p>\n
You see, the most striking difference between the \u2018religious\u2019 face and the \u2018non-religious\u2019 one is that the non-religious<\/span> face is smiling.<\/p>\nIn fact, the same goes for all the pairs of female faces that the raters were able to identify correctly. The lucky face and the trustworthy face are both smiling.<\/p>\n
The raters couldn\u2019t get the male faces right. And sure enough, neither pair of male faces are smiling. It seems that it\u2019s the smile that gives the game away. In a letter in the 21 March issue, a reader points this out:<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>
\nOur brains seem to be hard-wired to interpret smiling positively. Nearly all of your data can be explained by it, yet the experiment does not control for smiles.<\/p>\n
Only the paired female images gave positive results, and those were the pairs that exhibited greater differences in their smiles. For example, both composite faces under the \u201cHumorous?\u201d heading are smiling to a similar extent, and there was no difference found between them. In the \u201cReligious?\u201d category, we might suppose that people would consider those who are religious to be more serious, and the image with the smaller smile is indeed chosen by the majority. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Wiseman responds by conceding that smiling might explain \u2018some\u2019 of the results. But points out that religious people are supposed to be happier than the non-religious.<\/p>\n
This study doesn\u2019t show that you can identify religious people by the shape of their faces. But it does suggest that, in the UK at least, religious people are thought of as unsmiling.<\/p>\n
That would explain why the religious people didn\u2019t smile. They knew, of course, that the photograph was going to be linked to their personality traits. And that knowledge would undoubtedly change their behaviour.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, both religious and non-religious, and the raters, knew the rules of the game. Religious people in the UK aren\u2019t supposed to be smiley!<\/p>\n
_______________________________________________________________________________________
![\"Creative](\"https:\/\/i.creativecommons.org\/l\/by-sa\/2.0\/uk\/88x31.png\")
<\/a><\/span>This work by Tom Rees<\/a> is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Does this look like a religious woman to you? According to a study by Prof Richard Wiseman in the New Scientist in February this year (hey, I\u2019ve only just read it, OK?), this is a typical face of a religious person in the UK. What they did was to ask readers to send in photos […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2091,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_8sY9bx8acNM\/SqLSU8QlImI\/AAAAAAAAAdU\/20EjUdQi6B8\/s1600-h\/Wiseman_face.jpg\")
<\/a>Does this look like a religious woman to you? According to a study by Prof Richard Wiseman <\/a> in the New Scientist in February this year (hey, I\u2019ve only just read it, OK?), this is a typical face of a religious person in the UK.<\/p>\n