About face---People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks

From The Economist print edition


SCIENCE proceeds by trial and error. The successes are trumpeted. The errors are often regarded with embarrassment by subsequent generations, and locked away in attic rooms of the subject’s mansion like mad relatives in a Victorian novel. Usually, they stay there. Craniology, phrenology and eugenics, once-respectable fields of endeavour that are now regarded with a shudder, may shriek from time to time, but few sane people pay attention to them. One, however, has escaped recently, and is trying to rehabilitate itself. For years physiognomy—the idea that a person’s face is a reflection of his character—was sneered at. Now, it is making a come back.
Appearances certainly count. Women, for instance, judge men by their faces. Testosterone levels are reflected in the face, and who is seen as a one-night stand and who as a potential husband depends in part on this physical feature. Similarly, a male face betrays the owner’s underlying aggressiveness and even his business acumen. Facial beauty in either sex is also associated with higher incomes. The latest research, though, cuts to the moral quick. For Jefferson Duarte of Rice University in Houston, Texas, and his colleagues are suggesting that one of a person’s most telling moral features, his creditworthiness, can also be seen in his face.
Dr Duarte’s research was enabled by the internet. Once, if you wanted to borrow money, you had either to visit a bank or to tap a rich friend or relative. Now it is possible to do business directly with a stranger, using a peer-to-peer lending site. The needy advertise themselves, and how much they want. Those flush with cash assess potential borrowers and decide who to lend to, and at what rate of interest.
The borrowers themselves have to disclose their financial positions, credit histories, jobs and education. Often, though this is not required, they also post photographs of themselves. That means it might be possible to assess the effects of appearance on the outcome. And the process is an open auction, which means that all offers, acceptances and rejections are in the public domain.
For his research, Dr Duarte chose a site called Prosper.com. His intention was twofold: to see if physiognomy-based prejudices about creditworthiness existed and, if they did, whether they were justified. To do so he used another peer-to-peer website to subcontract the job of assessing creditworthiness to a number of ordinary people. The site in question (which is run by Amazon) is called Mechanical Turk. In this case the people it matches are those who have a task that needs doing, and those willing to perform it.