What’s in a Face? Sometimes You Can Judge a Book by Its Cover. Appearance Predicts Behavior in Surprising Ways—Some of the Time
The connection between looks and personality is the ultimate chicken-or-egg question. And it plays out on every face you meet.
Several years ago, a woman named Brook White appeared on the reality TV competition showAmerican Idol. White was 24 years old, blond, and strikingly pretty. When she sang her song, “Like a Star,” she struck a familiar chord among some viewers. White said nothing about her religion, but Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, were certain that she was one of their own.
“She has the Mormon Glow,” one blogger wrote, referring to the belief that the faithful radiate the Holy Spirit. White mentioned that she never drank a cup of coffee or watched an R-rated movie—signs of a Mormon-like squeaky-clean lifestyle. But the “glow” clinched it, and it turned out that her fans were right. “I didn’t know I was setting off the Mormon radar,” White remarked later in an interview with The Arizona Republic
Soon after, psychologists Nalini Ambady, then at Tufts University, and Nicholas Rule, at the University of Toronto, set out to test the Mormon glow. One way to do this is to see if even non-Mormons can detect it. The psychologists began their experiment by cropping head shots of Mormons and non-Mormons and asking undergraduate volunteers whether they could pick out the Mormons.
They certainly could—and in just a glance. While random guessing would yield 50 percent accuracy, as in a coin toss, the volunteers accurately identified Mormon men and women 60 percent of the time. (Mormons themselves were only slightly more accurate.) This means that “Mordar” isn’t foolproof, but it’s statistically significant—about as accurate as the ability to tell if a face looks envious or anxious.