, and can even bear on life-or-death situations. If having the “right” kinds of facial features is a good thing, what does this mean for people with the “wrong” kinds of facial features—those that deviate from the norm?We have reported that people whose faces have anomalous features—like scars, cleft lip and palate, or paralysis—suffer social penalties for looking different. People with anomalous faces are seen as less attractive and less trustworthy than people whose faces lack such features.
Both potential routes to the anomalous-is-bad stereotype—as a byproduct of an adaptation for avoiding pathogens, or as a byproduct of cultural learning—are plausible. How can we tell which one is right? This isn’t just a problem for researchers interested in facial differences—an overreliance on research volunteers from populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic threatens the generalizability of research in psychology and allied disciplines more generally.
—if it’s linked to avoiding pathogens then we should find evidence for it in people who aren’t WEIRD. We teamed up with cross-cultural psychologists Kristopher Smith and Coren Apicella to test this idea in a recently published study.We looked for evidence of the anomalous-is-bad stereotype in members of a hunter-gatherer tribe in northwestern Tanzania, the Hadza.The Hadza hunter-gatherers’ lives are very different from that of the average person in a materially developed culture.
Using computer algorithms, we created photographs of never-before-seen Hadza and digitally superimposed scars onto their faces. We took these photographs to ten Hadza camps and asked Hadza volunteers about their reactions to the faces in the photographs. We showed them two face photographs—one with a scar and one without—and asked which person they expected to have better moral character.
At first, our results looked consistent with the idea that pathogen avoidance is at the root of the anomalous-is-bad stereotype. When asked who they thought had better moral character, the Hadza picked typical faces more often than scarred ones. When we took into account how much exposure each Hadza had to non-Hadza culture, though, evidence for the generalizability of the anomalous-is-bad stereotype vanished.
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