Facial Profiling

When does facial expression reading bleed over into facial profiling? Dr. Paul Ekman and other experts in the field of facial movement and expression are consistent in their message - you should see a person's neutral face, their baseline expressions, BEFORE you attempt to draw much conclusion from static photos, in particular.

And yet some research seems to point to people being able to predict some personality features by looking at pictures of faces. What's going on here? Is "facial profiling" ever reasonable, ever fair?

Slate Magazine has a great article on the subject:

But today, physiognomy is making a comeback. In the last decade, breakthroughs in 3-D modeling and animation software have opened up the field. At the same time, ideas from genetics and evolutionary psychology are reanimating old debates about biological determinism, race and gender differences, and why humans possess the faces and bodies that we do.

The new research suggests we are more skilled at "reading faces" than we knew. People are surprisingly adept at assessing sexual orientation from headshots. Five-year-olds can predict election outcomes based on photos of the candidates. We can even guess whether a face belongs to a Democrat or a Republican at a rate better than chance, according to a forthcoming study out of Princeton.