In addition to observing the entire face, two specific features can also reveal a person’s socio-economic status.
A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2017 demonstrated that just by looking at someone, you can determine whether they are rich or poor. While people often say that “money can’t buy happiness,” it turns out that wealthy individuals tend to appear happier.
“The relationship between happiness and social class has been established in several previous studies,” said R. Thora Bjornsdottir, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto (Canada) and co-author of the study, in an interview with CNBC Make It.
Overall, wealthy individuals are likely to experience less anxiety compared to those struggling to make ends meet. Bjornsdottir and her team found that “these differences in happiness are indeed reflected on people’s faces.”
Bjornsdottir and her colleague, psychology professor Nicholas O. Rule (University of Toronto, Canada), showed 81 students from diverse ethnic backgrounds black and white photographs of 80 men and 80 women, aged between 18 and 35, who had no tattoos or piercings. The photographs were sourced from dating websites.
Half of the individuals in the photos earned over $150,000 per year, classified by the researchers as upper class, while the other half earned less than $35,000 per year, categorized as working class.
When survey participants were asked to guess the social class of the individuals in the photos, they were correct 68% of the time, significantly higher than random guessing.
The four individuals on the left have higher incomes than those on the right.
“I didn’t think the effect would be so strong, especially considering the subtle differences in faces. That was the most surprising part of the study for me,” Professor Rule remarked.
According to doctoral candidate Bjornsdottir, the survey participants were initially unaware of the cues they used to make their judgments. “If you ask them why, they wouldn’t know. They are unaware of how they did it,” Bjornsdottir explained.
The researchers zoomed in on facial features of 160 subjects. They discovered that participants could accurately guess social class just by looking at the eyes, with a better clue being the mouth. However, no single feature was as reliable an indicator as the entire face.
“People often use their mouths to express positive emotions, like smiling. The eyes also serve as a strong indicator of happiness, especially in the past when crow’s feet around the eyes indicated the contraction of the eye muscles, activated when someone smiles,” Rule elaborated.
People often use their mouths to express positive emotions. (Illustrative image)
Bjornsdottir noted that this effect “might be due to the emotional patterns that have become ingrained in their faces over time.” Chronic contraction of certain muscles can lead to changes in your facial structure that others may recognize, even if they are not consciously aware of it.
“Over time, your face will permanently reflect and reveal your experiences,” Rule stated, “Even when we think we’re not expressing anything, traces of those emotions remain.”
In other words, if someone has generally lived a happy and prosperous life, they will appear happy even when maintaining a so-called “neutral” expression. However, when the individuals in the photos intentionally smiled, the group of students could no longer distinguish between the rich and the poor.
They also realized that participants analyzed wealth and poverty equally well, regardless of whether they looked at a photo for as long as they wanted or just half a second. This suggests that such assessments are made quickly, perhaps almost unconsciously in our daily lives.
Participants were equally skilled at analyzing wealth and poverty, regardless of how long they viewed a photo. (Illustrative image)
This unconscious assessment was further confirmed in the survey. The student subjects were asked who in the photos would be most likely to secure an accounting job. This profession was chosen because it is not particularly associated with the wealthy or the poor, unlike specific roles such as hedge fund managers or house cleaners. However, participants tended to choose wealthy individuals as more likely to get the accounting job.
