A recently published peer-reviewed study American psychologist The Journal claims that a combination of facial recognition and artificial intelligence can accurately assess a person’s political leanings simply by looking at that person’s blank, expressionless face.
The study was written by researchers at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Researchers write that before the experiment, they had 591 participants answer a political questionnaire that provided insight into their political beliefs. The same participants were then scanned by the researchers’ AI algorithm, which attempted to assess where they fell on the political spectrum. The algorithm was generally able to identify with a high degree of accuracy what a person’s political orientation was, even if that person’s identity “was not correlated with age, gender, and ethnicity,” researchers wrote. “The algorithm’s prediction accuracy was even higher” when it had access to “participants’ age, gender, and ethnicity,” researchers write. The levels of accuracy were broken down and expressed in formulas across different situations, but the researchers summarized them as being “on par with how well interviews predict career success or how well alcohol drives aggressiveness.”
Before this experiment, the researchers examined the “differences between average facial contours” of the “most liberal and conservative men and women” and incorporated this research into their analysis. According to this analysis – and I must warn you, it’s kind of funny – liberals and conservatives have significantly different facial morphologies. Liberals have “smaller undersides” and “lips and noses.” [that] are shifted downward” and chins that are “smaller” than conservatives, researchers write. The researchers later reiterate the central conclusion: “Liberals tended to have smaller faces.”
So, according to this theory, if you have a small face, you are probably a progressive. On the other hand, if you have a big, fat face, there’s a good chance you’re a Trump voter. Face/head is apparently fate. Researchers justify this assessment by pointing to the way social expectations regarding physical appearance can influence personality development:
…facial appearance can influence psychological traits…People largely agree when it comes to judging political orientation based on faces (Todorov et al., 2015). Regardless of whether such judgments are accurate, the self-fulfilling prophecy effect (Merton, 1936) assumes that people who are attributed a certain characteristic will be treated accordingly; internalize such attributions; and, over time, may engage in behaviors consistent with others’ perceptions (Slepian & Ames, 2016). For example, people with larger jaws, who are often perceived as more socially dominant (a trait associated with political conservatism), could become dominant personalities over time.
Once the researchers established this alleged connection between certain facial morphologies and political orientations, they were able to create a database of faces that fell into these different categories and test their facial recognition algorithm to see if it could accurately predict which faces with certain political orientations Orientations correlated. According to them, it worked.
“We show that political orientation can be predicted from neutral facial images by both humans and algorithms, even when factors such as age, gender and ethnicity are taken into account.” This suggests a connection between political leanings and inherent facial characteristics that are largely are beyond an individual’s control,” the study says.
The researchers continued: “Most importantly, our results suggest that widely used biometric surveillance technologies are more threatening than previously thought.” Particularly when it comes to specifically spreading political messages online, AI’s ability to predict political ones could be a challenge Guessing a person’s orientation can be very valuable.
Conclusion: If your face is big, you are a conservative; if it is thin, you are a liberal; and facial recognition is bad – we all know that. That seems to be all you need to know.