Resting Rich Face: Non-Verbals

[James Cruse]

This is an interesting study done in Toronto asking University students to guess the socio-economic status of the person, based on

Resting Rich Face

Your resting expression may reveal your socio-economic status.

bigthink.com

Turns out they accurately guesses more often then not, even being that young.

My contention is that if those same people involved had have seen those same people in real life, moving and interacting with people, they would guess far more accurately who is wealthy/has high status than they could from just facial photos.

I think people here very much under-rate the effect of your own body language, body tension and all your movements in how people perceive you and especially how women see you.

 

[ulrich]

Is there a link to the actual study?

I’d like to see the way they define the experiment and the sample size to confirm if the conclusions are sound and bias free.

 

[Train]

Is there a link to the actual study?

I’d like to see the way they define the experiment and the sample size to confirm if the conclusions are sound and bias free.

This should be the link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317252320_The_Visibility_of_Social_Class_From_Facial_Cues

Author(s) have other interesting studies regarding faces: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Bjornsdottir+RT&cauthor_id=34296765

 

[ulrich]

Whoa!
Despite the small sample sizes, this is a very thorough and deep study.
Much better than the ones you usually find regarding social psychology.

My only concern in this study is that they separate the income level of the subjects on two very different brackets (families earning less than 35K USD per year and families earning more than 100K USD per year).
I wonder how the study would have resulted if they had used a significant number of people in between.

So yeah, it seems people (particularly women) are good at telling rich from poor through face attractiveness/health.
The conclusion can’t be easily extended for middle classes, though.

 

[James Cruse]

So yeah, it seems people (particularly women) are good at telling rich from poor through face attractiveness/health.
The conclusion can’t be easily extended for middle classes, though.

I think the point of the study as it applies to seduction has been missed here.

As per my original post - these people in the study judged a person’s income from a single still image of a person’s face only and they did so with more accuracy than chance + were young people.

The way this applies to seduction is: imagine how much more women would see this with a live person, moving and talking in front of them - so 1,000x the amount of information to make this judgement.

If our body langauge can be made to look wealthy, relaxed and masculine, than we’re ahead of everyone around us without having to say a word to a woman.