People Assume Men With This Face Shape Are Better Protectors, Psychologists Say - VICE

There are men walking around with faces that make strangers assume they’d be good at protecting children and making good fathers. They don’t have to say anything. They don’t have to do anything. It happens in a split second when someone looks at them. 

A new study in Evolutionary Psychological Science found that men with wider faces were consistently judged as stronger protectors of children than nurturers. The researchers were looking at facial width-to-height ratio, which compares cheek-to-cheek width with the distance from the upper lip to the brow. Past research has linked wider male faces with perceptions of strength and aggression, and those assumptions seem to carry over here.

University of Arkansas psychologist Mitch Brown and his team ran four experiments. In one, participants were asked to choose men for a hypothetical team that would protect children. They picked wider-faced men at a rate of 2.78 to 1.15 over men with longer faces. When the task changed to nurturing, the split was basically even.

Then the researchers asked people what kind of relationship they thought these men wanted. Wider-faced men were seen as more interested in short-term mating, while men with longer faces were judged as more interested in long-term relationships.

So the same face that reads as “good protector” can also make people assume “probably not looking to settle down.”

One of the stranger experiments involved turning the photos upside down. Once the faces were inverted, judgments about protective ability dropped. That suggests people are responding to the overall face rather than one isolated feature. Nurturing judgments didn’t change in the same way.

Brown told PsyPost that the effects were fairly large, and that humans may have developed a habit of making quick judgments from limited information when there wasn’t much time to get to know someone.

He’s now studying whether the same facial cue affects custody decisions in divorce cases. That’s where the aggression piece could cut the other way. A face that suggests strength to one person could suggest threat to another.

The study never tested whether wider-faced men are actually better protectors, worse nurturers, or less committed partners. It only looked at the assumptions people made from a face alone. So a guy can get judged as dad material before he’s said a word.