Face Value: Why It's Time for a Congressional Face Lift

by Nomad

Here are two very similar faces. Even though they could be identical twins, the differences between them are quite subtle. You have to look carefully.

Let's play a little game with Larry and Ralph. This game involves your perceptions, not facts. There are no wrong answers.
So, speaking purely from a superficial view:

• Which one of these two men would you be more likely to trust?
• If you owned a business, which one would you hire as an employee?  
• If you had to rely on one of these two in an emergency, which would it be?
• Which would prefer to have as your neighbor?
• Which one would you think is more intelligent?
• Which one would you think would be more progressive? More conservative? 
• Which one of the two people do you think would be more likely to represent your way of thinking? 

I know what you're thinking: How can anybody make assessments like this based on such limited and superficial information? And you would be right.

Yet, scientists recognize that we subconsciously do it all the time, even when those judgments have no basis in reality. Studies have shown that facial bias affects who we vote for, date, hire, prosecute, convict, and more.

So, I would be interested to hear your answers. Feel free to invite others to participate. Tomorrow, I will update this post with explanations.

Update:

Yesterday, I posted a series of questions about the images above. It was interesting to hear your responses.

The Face of Mr. and Ms. Average

Time for an explanation. The two images are not actually photos but composites of hundreds of photos.  A BBC article explains how it works:

The face-blending algorithm works by marking 68 points on each face, including six points on each eye, 16 on the jawline and nine on the nose. This creates a face ‘fingerprint’ and is essentially the same approach as facial recognition software. We then used a technique called “Delauney Triangulation” to calculate the average position of all these feature points, as well as blending colours such as skin tone.

By combining these 68 points of all sampled faces, you can end up with the average face of any given group. It could the average New Yorker, for example. Or the average face of a woman over 40. So long as you have a large enough sample, anything is possible.

Here's an example of the average male and female face of Spain. To put it another way, if Spain was one male individual, he would look like the man on the right and if all women of Spain was just one woman, she would like the woman on the right side. 

If you'd care to see what the average face looks like for every nation, click here.

After averaging the faces of 300 corporate leaders from 10 different industries, including the technology, entertainment, and the startup sectors, researchers have discovered the composite face of male and female CEOs.
Meet the boss.

There are, in fact, all kinds of interesting uses for this technology. One intriguing application is measuring how the different aspects of an appearance can subjectively influence our judgments. Scotland psychologist Lisa Debruine, for example, conducted a study to measure the different aspects of sex appeal.  

Obviously, there's plenty of room for abuse, especially in terms of profiling in the hands of an authoritarian state. Woe to poor you if your kisser just happens to resemble the average drug dealer or a tax cheat. 

Unless you look like a Kardashian, very few of us would like to be judged solely at face value. It would be a society forever locked in high school mode. 

When complexities of politics become too much for the average voter to comprehend, can democracy survive if voters' decisions are based only on the candidate's appearance? What happens when the population becomes so dumbed down that the composite face of the ideal leader becomes the only politician anybody will vote for, regardless of his/ her personal ethics? But hopefully, that will never happen, right?

Averaging America's Leadership

That brings us back to the pair of photos at the top. On the left is the composite image of all Democratic members of Congress in 2017 and on the right, we see the corresponding composite from all Republican members. (This average includes both sexes.)

What about your opinions? Did you find yourself drawn more to the left or to the right side in your subjective judgments?

A quick glance tells us that the two images are very similar. No doubt about it, in both cases, we are looking at a white male. In the image on the left, however, there is a subtle difference in skin tone.

That shouldn't be a great surprise. The 115th session of Congress is the most racially diverse in US history. Even though, Congress is overwhelming white, nearly one-in-five voting members of the House and Senate are a racial or ethnic minority. Despite that, we shouldn't forget that, as the New York Times recently reported:

The makeup of Congress skews disproportionately white, and among the minority House members, a large percentage represent gerrymandered districts made up predominantly of minority voters.

If you thought the image on the left seemed more ever so slightly feminine, then that too makes sense. Even though they are outnumbered by Republicans, Democrats, have three times more women in the two chambers.
If the world were fair (spoiler alert: it isn't) then the images should look much more gender-neutral. There are more slightly more women in the population than men and yet that is not represented in the composite.

What about 116th Congress, scheduled to take office in January 2019? Will the average face of the two political parties in Congress look any different? That's up to voters, of course. However, there's every indication that the face of the Democratic party will look more like Eve than Adam.

According to one source, of the 41 states that have held their primaries, 41 percent of all Democratic Party nominees — and 48 percent of all non-incumbent nominees — are women, a level that simply obliterates all previous records.

Women, and especially college-educated women, have been the epicenter of political backlash to Donald Trump ever since the record-breaking Women’s March on Washington that quickly followed his inauguration. That trend, paired with Trump’s overall unpopularity, appears set to launch the number of women in Congress to unprecedented levels. Trump has inspired a record number of women to run for Congress and win Democratic Party nominations.

If the blue wave actually materializes in 2018, the face on the left- indeed, the face of the Left- is likely to reflect America's democratic diversity, while the face on the right will become much older and grayer.
And a slightly less convincing smile.

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