Jurors may condemn a person to death based on how untrustworthy they look without even realizing it, new research has found.
Biases regarding specific facial features may sway a jury into believing a person is guilty, despite these features having no correlation with the person's guilt, new research in the journal Psychological Science has shown.
These facial features include down-turned lips and heavy brows, the study reveals.
"These findings bolster prior work that facial stereotypes may have disastrous effects in the real world, but, more importantly, provide a potential inroad toward combating these sorts of biases," Jon Freeman, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University, and paper co-author, said in a statement.
The researchers—all hailing from Columbia University—conducted a survey of more than 1,400 volunteers, showing them mugshots of 400 inmates in Florida who had been convicted of murder. All the inmates were white males to eliminate the additional effects of racial and gender biases.
The participants were asked to judge how trustworthy they found the person in the mugshot and the survey found that prisoners with more untrustworthy-looking faces according to the participants were much more likely to have been sentenced to death rather than life in prison.
They also found that in a mock jury experiment, jurors were more likely to think a defendant with a more untrustworthy facial appearance was guilty.
Previous studies have found that baby-faced individuals are usually seen as trustworthy, honest, and kind, and therefore experience more leniency in court, while competent-looking people are favored as business leaders despite lacking evidence of performing any better than anyone else.
While these findings are shocking, the researchers also found a way to remove these biases from people using a training intervention. This trained the participants to unpair their associations between facial features and untrustworthiness, using a computer task to make them associate untrustworthy-looking facial features with trustworthy behaviors.
After this training, the participants were found to rely much less on these facial stereotypes compared to an untrained control group. This finding is important, as it not only eliminated the biases in the participants' conscious decisions, but also their unconscious ones.
"By exposing a cognitive pathway toward eradicating facial stereotypes, future research must investigate whether this training could be broadly applied and how to ensure the bias reduction persists over time," Freeman said.
These findings may help tackle facial biases in the justice system, but also in other contexts where decisions are made about people, ranging from social interactions to hiring or elections.
"If there are consequential judgments that are biased by facial stereotypes, our findings suggest that they have the potential to be flexibly remapped and dismantled," the authors wrote in the paper.
Newsweek has contacted the authors for further comment.
The researchers hope to further expand their findings by using their intervention methods to eliminate biases with racially and gender-diverse faces.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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