People With ‘Resting Bitch Face’ Are Socially Doomed
A new study just revealed that people find it easy to exclude those with a “resting bitch face” from a group.
Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland, led by Dr. Selma Rudert, discovered that as humans, not only do we first judge people based on their appearance, but we have no issue rejecting people who have facial features that indicate they deserve it.
The study asked participants to evaluate a situation where a group had excluded somebody. They weren’t give a reason why, but instead shown a picture of a person with a manipulated facial expression. Here he is:
An overall majority of the participants legit thought it was chill to kick somebody out of the group because they looked cold and incompetent. But why? Well, people feel bad for nice looking people and feel disgust towards mean looking people (lol).
“Since individuals make use of other’s facial features for their moral judgments, people whose faces appear both cold and incompetent might be more likely to be perceived as such troublemakers—and consequently, individuals judge it as more acceptable to exclude them,” Rudert told Broadly.
But that’s not all! The study also revealed that we’re way too nice to people with warm and competent faces. “Research has shown that persons with a so-called ‘babyface’ receive more help from others and are less likely to be found guilty for intentional criminal acts,” Rudert added.
Welp, it is hard to ignore a face! But we should probably all make more of an effort to judge somebody’s character before their facial features… even if science gives us a reason not to.
