Facial recognition technology and human raters can predict political orientation from images of expressionless faces even when controlling for demographics and self-presentation.

Carefully standardized facial images of 591 participants were taken in the laboratory while controlling for self-presentation, facial expression, head orientation, and image properties. They were presented to human raters and a facial recognition algorithm: both humans (r = .21) and the algorithm (r = .22) could predict participants' scores on a political orientation scale (Cronbach's α = .94) decorrelated with age, gender, and ethnicity. These effects are on par with how well job interviews predict job success, or alcohol drives aggressiveness. The algorithm's predictive accuracy was even higher (r = .31) when it leveraged information on participants' age, gender, and ethnicity. Moreover, the associations between facial appearance and political orientation seem to generalize beyond our sample: The predictive model derived from standardized images (while controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity) could predict political orientation (r ≈ .13) from naturalistic images of 3,401 politicians from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The analysis of facial features associated with political orientation revealed that conservatives tended to have larger lower faces. The predictability of political orientation from standardized images has critical implications for privacy, the regulation of facial recognition technology, and understanding the origins and consequences of political orientation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Tailoring recommendation algorithms to ideal preferences makes users better off.

People often struggle to do what they ideally want because of a conflict between their actual and ideal preferences. ​​​By focusing on maximizing engagement, recommendation algorithms appear to be exacerbating this struggle. However, this need not be the case. Here we show that tailoring recommendation algorithms to ideal (vs. actual) preferences would provide meaningful benefits to both users and companies. To examine this, we built algorithmic recommendation systems that generated real-time, personalized recommendations tailored to either a person's actual or ideal preferences. Then, in a high-powered, pre-registered experiment (n = 6488), we measured the effects of these recommendation algorithms. We found that targeting ideal rather than actual preferences resulted in somewhat fewer clicks, but it also increased the extent to which people felt better off and that their time was well spent. Moreover, of note to companies, targeting ideal preferences increased users' willingness to pay for the service, the extent to which they felt the company had their best interest at heart, and their likelihood of using the service again. Our results suggest that users and companies would be better off if recommendation algorithms learned what each person was striving for and nudged individuals toward their own unique ideals.

Dominant, open nonverbal displays are attractive at zero-acquaintance.

Across two field studies of romantic attraction, we demonstrate that postural expansiveness makes humans more romantically appealing. In a field study (n = 144 speed-dates), we coded nonverbal behaviors associated with liking, love, and dominance. Postural expansiveness-expanding the body in physical space-was most predictive of attraction, with each one-unit increase in coded behavior from the video recordings nearly doubling a person's odds of getting a "yes" response from one's speed-dating partner. In a subsequent field experiment (n = 3,000), we tested the causality of postural expansion (vs. contraction) on attraction using a popular Global Positioning System-based online-dating application. Mate-seekers rapidly flipped through photographs of potential sexual/date partners, selecting those they desired to meet for a date. Mate-seekers were significantly more likely to select partners displaying an expansive (vs. contractive) nonverbal posture. Mediation analyses demonstrate one plausible mechanism through which expansiveness is appealing: Expansiveness makes the dating candidate appear more dominant. In a dating world in which success sometimes is determined by a split-second decision rendered after a brief interaction or exposure to a static photograph, single persons have very little time to make a good impression. Our research suggests that a nonverbal dominance display increases a person's chances of being selected as a potential mate.

Physically scarce (vs. enriched) environments decrease the ability to tell lies successfully.

The successful detection of deception is of critical importance to adaptive social relationships and organizations, and perhaps even national security. However, research in forensic, legal, and social psychology demonstrates that people are generally very successful deceivers. The goal of the current research was to test an intervention with the potential to decrease the likelihood of successful deception. We applied findings in the architectural, engineering, and environmental sciences that has demonstrated that enriched environments (vs. scarce ones) promote the experience of comfort, positive emotion, feelings of power and control, and increase productivity. We hypothesized that sparse, impoverished, scarcely endowed environments (vs. enriched ones) would decrease the ability to lie successfully by making liars feel uncomfortable and powerless. Study 1 examined archival footage of an international sample of criminal suspects (N = 59), including innocent relatives (n = 33) and convicted murderers (n = 26) emotionally pleading to the public for the return of a missing person. Liars in scarce environments (vs. enriched) were significantly more likely to reveal their lies through behavioral cues to deception. Study 2 (N = 79) demonstrated that the discomfort and subsequent powerlessness caused by scarce (vs. enriched) environments lead people to reveal behavioral cues to deception. Liars in scarce environments also experienced greater neuroendocrine stress reactivity and were more accurately detected by a sample of 66 naïve observers (Study 3). Taken together, data suggest that scarce environments increase difficulty, and decrease success, of deception. Further, we make available videotaped stimuli of Study 2 liars and truth-tellers.