| A Rice University study found that lenders may judge your creditworthiness based on how trustworthy they think you look. The researchers didn’t pinpoint which physical characteristics look most or least trustworthy, but if they do in the future, might plastic surgery go from a luxury good to a financially necessity? [%comments]
Is Untrustworthy the New Ugly?
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I find this study odd.
I can’t remember ever coming face-to-face with the decision maker when applying for a loan. How often does this actually happen anymore?
This article is really terribly written. There were two major components to the study, and the article tried to treat them as if they were the same point. You can ready a better summary and the paper here, and there’s a link to the full paper.
http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=12299
It’s remarkable how much trustworthiness can be read from a person’s face. It has more to do with their countenance and how they hold their mouth and brow than it does with their permanent features.
See here: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/13/research-on-snap-jud.html
The repeated misunderstandings of the actual study can be traced to the original post, which said, “lenders may judge your creditworthiness based on how trustworthy they think you look,” That implies that your looks are a factor in the decision making. The study was about no such thing. Link is right that the original article is badly, and obviously misleadingly, written — based simply on the evidence.
The study said that “MTurk workers could distinguish people with high credit scores from people with low credit scores based solely on the photographs.” (The MTurk workers were apparently a simple source to hire people to participate.) This doesn’t say that lenders use your photographs, this says that random people, not in the finance business, could make accurate guesses about someone’s credit history based on their photographs.
What this proves is not racism, but as the song says, “You can’t hide those lying eyes.”
@ #3 Vi: “How curious… why would you think being beautiful equates to being trustworthy?”
Perhaps because you’ve watched too many Disney movies where all the evil characters look evil and even have evil-sounding names like Cruella?