What Science Says About Face Reading: From 19th-Century Criminal Physiognomy to Modern Research

What Science Says About Face Reading: From 19th-Century Criminal Physiognomy to Current Research

What Is Face Reading and Why Has It Endured So Long?

Face reading (nhân tướng học in the East, physiognomy in the West) is a collection of methods for observing the lines, proportions, colours, moles and wrinkles on a face in order to infer a person's character, fate, health or fortunes.

In the East, nhân tướng học is tied to the philosophy of yin and yang and the five elements, viewing the human being as a microcosm reflecting the laws of heaven and earth. In the West, since ancient Greece, scholars have believed that outward appearance reflects inner nature. By the 18th and 19th centuries, this current was dressed in scientific clothing, most notably Cesare Lombroso's theory of criminal physiognomy.

What every tradition of face reading shares is an assumption: that inside and outside correlate. This is a very powerful intuitive assumption, because in daily life we constantly guess other people's emotions from their facial expressions. The problem is that going from momentary emotional correlation to conclusions about destiny is a very long leap.

Comparison table of the concepts and arguments about face reading in this article.

19th-Century Criminal Physiognomy: A Scientific Dead End

Who Was Cesare Lombroso and What Was the "Born Criminal" Idea?

In the second half of the 19th century, the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso proposed that criminals were a biologically degenerate type of person, identifiable by physical features such as a low and narrow forehead, high cheekbones, a large jaw, malformed ears and asymmetrical eyes. He held that these signs reflected an innate tendency to commit crime.

This theory once exerted great influence in criminal justice and psychiatry of the time. But it was later strongly rejected for many reasons: subjective observation methods, biased study samples, no control group, and most importantly, conclusions shaped by social prejudice.

Why Did Criminal Physiognomy Collapse?

Modern researchers point to three fundamental errors:

• Sampling error: Lombroso mainly observed prisoners, that is, a group already marked by the justice system, not representative of the whole population.
• Reverse inference error: Seeing many prisoners with trait X, then concluding that trait X causes crime, whereas X may be common among people who commit no crime at all.
• Prejudice error: The features considered "criminal" were usually attached to the poor, immigrants, or groups stigmatised by society.

This is an important lesson: face reading, even dressed in scientific clothing, very easily slides into labelling people based on appearance.

A View from Anthropology: Anthropology Is Not for Reading Faces or Fortunes

Many people mistakenly think that studying anthropology is for reading faces and divining fortunes. In fact, anthropology is a scientific field that integrates knowledge from the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts to study human beings as a whole.

Anthropology has five fields: physical anthropology, archaeology, sociocultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology and applied anthropology. Physical anthropology does study the variation and evolution of the human body, but its aim is to understand the biological and historical processes of humankind, not to pronounce on an individual's fate.

In other words, anthropology can help us understand why different cultures developed different systems of face reading, but it does not itself confirm that the pronouncements of face reading are true.

How Does Modern Psychology View Reading Faces?

We Read Faces Very Fast, but Not as Accurately as We Think

Psychological research shows that people tend to infer character from a face in just a few hundredths of a second. However, the accuracy of these judgements is usually very low when tested against objective criteria. We are influenced by:

• The halo effect: people with pleasing appearances are usually assigned many additional good qualities.
• Cultural prejudice: which facial features are considered "gentle", "fierce" or "intelligent" depends on cultural norms, not biological laws.
• Illusion of correlation: we remember the times we guessed right and forget the times we guessed wrong, so we come to believe face reading "works".

Why Are First Impressions of a Face So Powerful?

According to the overview by Alexander Todorov and colleagues in the Annual Review of Psychology in 2015, and in the book Face Value (Todorov, 2017), people infer character from faces very quickly, in about a tenth of a second, and many people tend to agree with one another about the same face. But the accuracy of those inferences is low. Notably, this first impression still drives real decisions in life, such as elections, hiring and court judgments, even though it is not informative in any reliable way.

In other words, the problem is not whether our eyes are sharp, but that we act on facial impressions as if they were the truth.

Is Judging Trustworthiness from a Face Accurate?

According to the meta-analysis by Y. Z. Foo and colleagues in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, judging trustworthiness from a face has accuracy but a modest one: a correlation coefficient r of about 0.14 at the face level and about 0.27 at the judge level, and the level of accuracy also depends on the behavioural domain being assessed. The scope needs to be stated clearly: this is a result for trustworthiness, not for every personality trait. For other traits the picture may differ and is generally even weaker.

Why Is the Same Face Judged Differently?

According to Olivola and Todorov (2010), when inferring people's traits from face photos, judges usually do worse than a simple approach that relies only on the base rate, that is, the general rate of that trait in the population. In other words, adding a face photo does not help you guess more accurately, and can even make it worse.

According to Rule and colleagues (2013), judgements of trustworthiness from a face depend heavily on the photo chosen. In their study, the faces of white-collar criminals were not judged as less trustworthy than the face of an ordinary executive. This shows that impressions from a face reflect the characteristics of the photograph and the context more than the nature of the person.

Is There Any "Kernel of Truth" in Inferring Character from Faces?

According to Penton-Voak and colleagues (2006), when judges were shown photos of 294 people, they could identify some traits such as extraversion at a level above chance. However, it must be said clearly: accuracy is very low and limited to a few traits, not evidence that the whole of a character or a destiny can be read from a face. This is a small "kernel of truth", not a complete map.

What Are the Common "Reading" Techniques in Divination in General?

Whether it is face reading, palm reading or card reading, practitioners usually use a number of similar psychological techniques:

• Cold reading: saying general things that are likely to be true of many people, while observing bodily reactions to adjust.
• Hot reading: gathering information about the client beforehand and then "pronouncing" as if it had been divined.
• Warm reading: using reasoning from context, for example, if someone died by drowning, describing the feeling of suffocation and cold.

The physicist Geoffrey Dean once systematised the principles and techniques of prediction used by fortune tellers, based on effects such as the Barnum effect (accepting general descriptions), the Dr Fox effect (trusting someone who appears erudite), and unfalsifiability (speaking vaguely so it is hard to catch an error).

What Is the Phenomenon of Autosuggestion?

One important mechanism that makes face reading seem true is autosuggestion. When told negative or positive things, the listener easily becomes fixated, adjusts their behaviour and unconsciously produces the outcome that matches the pronouncement. The brain also retains frightening information longer, so pronouncements of disaster tend to leave deeper traces than ordinary ones.

This explains why many people believe a face reader "told it right". It is not necessarily that the reader is skilled, but that the listener may have turned the pronouncement into the script of their own life.

Face Reading and Divination from a Cultural and Social Angle

Divination in general is defined as an effort to gain understanding of a question or situation through a standardised mystical process or ritual^[1]. Through a long social and religious history, divination has kept a certain place in human life, even though many scientists regard it as superstition or fraud.

The factors that make divination, including face reading, attractive:

• The need of the person seeking a reading: according to psychology, people who frequently consult fortune tellers tend to be credulous, anxious, lacking belief in themselves and lacking direction in life^[1].
• The need for answers about the future: people always want to know their fate, household matters and career in advance, so they easily turn to wherever there are answers.
• Mystery stimulates curiosity: the ritual atmosphere, costumes and tools create a supernatural feeling, making the client easily enchanted.

From this angle, face reading is not only a question of true or false, but also a cultural phenomenon reflecting human psychological needs in the face of uncertainty.

What Are the Common Misconceptions About Face Reading?

• Misconception 1: Facial features determine destiny. In reality, destiny is affected by countless factors: circumstances, education, effort, health, luck, personal decisions.
• Misconception 2: Criminals can be identified by their faces. This is a legacy of Lombroso's theory that has been rejected, and today is regarded as dangerous prejudice.
• Misconception 3: A good face reader always guesses right. Cold reading, hot reading, warm reading and autosuggestion explain most cases of things "working".
• Misconception 4: Science has proven face reading. There is not yet strong enough scientific evidence to assert a causal link between facial features and destiny.

So How Should Face Reading Be Regarded?

In the spirit of much scientific and psychological literature, divination in general is not for knowing the future in advance, but for each person to understand themselves and their own character better, and from there choose and decide their own future. Character makes destiny.

With face reading, a reasonable attitude might be:

• Treat it as a cultural tradition worth exploring, not a scientific truth.
• Do not use pronouncements from face reading to decide big matters such as marriage, investment or health.
• Do not let negative pronouncements dominate your psychology in the direction of autosuggestion.
• Verify every important piece of information with reliable sources and appropriate experts.

In other words, face reading can be a pastime, a way of self-reflection, but it should not replace critical thinking and personal responsibility for one's own life.