The Facial Width-to-Height Ratio as a Basis for Estimating Aggression from Emotionally Neutral Faces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR), a size-independent sexually dimorphic property of the human face, is correlated with aggressive behaviour in men. Furthermore, observers' estimates of aggression from emotionally neutral faces are accurate and are highly correlated with the FWHR. In a series of experiments we tested if the FWHR is the basis of observers' accuracy in estimating aggressive propensity from emotionally neutral faces. In Experiments 1a-c, estimates of aggression remained accurate when faces were blurred or cropped, manipulations that reduce featural cues but maintain FWHR. Accuracy decreased when faces were scrambled, a manipulation that retains featural information but disrupts the FWHR. The estimates of aggression were highly consistent across observers for all conditions except the scrambled condition. Overall, estimates of aggression were most accurate when all facial features (even if blurred) were presented in their canonical arrangement, allowing for perception of the FWHR, with at most a small contribution from the appearance of individual features. There was no explicit use of the FWHR; 84% of participants indicated that “the eyes” were the basis for their judgement. No participant reported using any kind of configural information, including the FWHR. Nonetheless, in Experiment 1d, participants given instruction about the FWHR were able to accurately estimate the FWHR of faces presented for 39 msec. In Experiment 2, computer-modeling software (FACEGEN) identified eight facial metrics that correlated with estimates of aggression; regression analyses revealed that FWHR was the only metric that uniquely predicted these estimates. In Experiment 3, faces were manipulated to create pairs that differed only in FWHR. Participants' judgement of which individual of the pair was more aggressive was biased towards faces with the higher FWHR. Together, these experiments support the hypothesis that the FWHR is an honest signal of propensity for aggressive behaviour.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".