

People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks - tyn
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13253590&source=features_box_main

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lunchbox
Other factors to control for include piercings, haircut, facial hair, glasses,
makeup, any clothes in the picture (shirt/hat), hygiene, and tattoos.

However, it really wouldn't surprise me if some aspects of personality can, on
average, be discerned from facial appearances. In hunter-gatherer days, being
able to make an accurate snap judgment of a stranger's trustworthiness would
be a big evolutionary advantage. And it wouldn't surprise me either if genes
that affect one's personality (e.g. those relating to testosterone) affect
one's appearance as well.

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nazgulnarsil
but if this became widespread it would then become advantageous to be able to
fool other people's sense of trustworthiness by displaying the trustworthy
physical characteristics while actually being untrustworthy. ad infinitum...

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lunchbox
Excellent point! The old evolutionary arms race.

I think in the end, the set of genes that wins this game of cat and mouse will
be the one that has the strongest selection pressure. For example, being able
to detect untrustworthy people might increase my survival chances by x%, and
being able to fool people might increase my survival chances by y%. If x >> y,
then one would expect that most modern-day humans would be good at sniffing
out untrustworthy people; if y >> x, then modern-day humans would have
difficulty doing this, since the untrustworthy people have evolved an
extremely strong ability to escape detection.

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Goladus
Preventing emotion from showing on your face is nearly impossible. If you try
to hold a smile you don't actually feel, it is not difficult to others to
notice intuitively. They may not realize exactly what aspects of your face
didn't match up to the smile, but often they'll be able to observe that the
eyes didn't look right.

So I'm not all that surprised, really. Ability to recognize and read faces,
along with ability to recognize vocal stress, are both important skills for a
human.

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radu_floricica
Most pictures probably aren't taken with the express purpose of showing them
on the site.

It might be a couple of other things: first aspects of his background that are
discernable through a picture, and second that person's idea of what
constitutes a "proper" picture for this site.

The most interesting thing I learned is that there are these kind of sites...

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kurtosis
Ah this is truly a business opportunity - a nice supplement to your FICO score
forget mechanical turk:

Step (1): Get access to frontal photographs of a large random sample of
borrowers along with their financial history and records of any defaults.

Step (2): Extract a vector of facial features from each photo. Similar to the
feature vectors used to judge attractiveness in the work of Cohen-Or et al.
<http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~dcor/>

Step (3): Have users apply for a loan by submitting a mugshot. Use support
vector regression or some other similar technique to predict the probability
of default.

Step (4): Profit

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DenisM
Or maybe just the people with worse scores have the most need for money and
fewer options, and thus look more desperate.

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imp
Their test subjects came from Mechanical Turk. Is that considered reliable?
I'm skeptical. And if they were using Mechanical Turk, why didn't they get
1000 subjects instead of just 25?

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ars
I think you got it backward, read it again. He used the Mechanical Turk to put
a number on each face rather than just yes/no. He then compared the results
with actual loan applications, and found that it correlated pretty well.

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imp
Oh, I see now. Makes sense. Thanks.

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jeffbarr
There's some clarification on how the Turk was used at
<http://www.econsteve.com/?p=166> .

~~~
imp
Nice find!

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jeffbarr
Uh yeah, the blogger is my son.

~~~
imp
Oh, cool. I was wondering if there was a connection.

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rsheridan6
But do we react to the underlying physiognomy or the muscle tone (posture and
expressions on their faces)? It would be hard to separate these two factors,
but you could start by generating 3D faces with different physiognomy but the
same neutral expression.

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forgotpasswd
Makes sense: * If I'm usually hiding something, my muscle memory will keep my
face in that shape * If I'm usually open, vice versa Of course if I really
believe stealing is good, my face will be open. So it's basically showing
others what I believe about myself.

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hardik
Can you really come to a conclusion based on inputs of just 25 MTurkers? 25 is
less than 30 (the minimum required numbers to assume normal distribution) and
also all being MTurkers is also not a good sign of unbiasedness.

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omouse
Sorry, can't pay attention to The Economist for science/tech writing. They
have far too many misses vs. hits.

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lallysingh
Unrelated, but the article had one of the best photos I've seen for one in a
long time.

