How to Judge People by What They Look Like

by Edward Dutton

I have found one academic study which summarises research looking at the relationship between ornament size and personality (Steiner, 1980). It notes two key studies, both unpublished conference presentations by the American psychologist Nancy Hirshberg (1937-1979), who unfortunately seems to have been taken very young, and her colleagues. In these studies, the 144 subjects were female students at the University of Illinois. Large breast size was found to be significantly positively correlated with being ‘undersocialized’ (that is, antisocial), undependable, impulsive, ‘psychologically minded’ (that is introspective), flexible and adventurous. So, to some extent, the larger a woman’s breasts are the lower in Conscientiousness she is, the higher in Extraversion she is and the less Agreeable she is. Women with large buttocks were found to be introverted, self-abasing, and high in guilt. In other words, they were relatively low in Extraversion and relatively high in aspects of Neuroticism. Another study highlighted by Steiner (Wiggins et al., 1968) involved 95 male subjects. It found that men who like small breasts tend toward being religious and depressive, and men who like larger buttocks are ordered, dependent, and ‘self-blaming.’

What hand someone writes with – or, even better, waves with – will allow you to make cautious inferences about their psychology. Early research indicated that left-handers might be overrepresented among those with above average scores on specific measures of cognitive ability (Benbow, 1986; Halpern et al., 1998). However, a consistent pattern is emerging across studies with large samples and measures of general intelligence indicating that, on average, left-handed people are at a mild cognitive disadvantage relative to right-handers (Goodman, 2014; Johnston et al., 2013; Nicholls et al., 2010), and that this translates into real-world differences between the groups in terms of things like earnings (Goodman, 2014). So, those who have very high but narrow intelligence; where there are extraordinarily intelligent at just Maths, for example (Isaac Newton is an example) have elevated levels of left-handedness. However, in general, left-handed people are less intelligent than right-handed people.

Research has found that, when it comes to opposite sex friends, the male tends to primarily find his female friends physically attractive. By contrast, the female is primarily attracted to the psychological aspects of the male friend: it is his character that she finds most attractive (Bleske-Rechek et al., 2016). This is entirely consistent with the broader finding that males having nothing to lose from the sexual counter and thus may as well be promiscuous and copulate with as many healthy (and thus good looking) women as possible. Thus, males are evolved to focus on physical attractiveness in finding a mate, though psychological characteristics are also relevant. Females are evolved to prize psychological characteristics over physical ones (Buss, 1989). Thus, the dynamics of opposite sex friendships are very similar to those of sexual relationships: the opposite sex friends, as it were, ‘like’ each other, but not quite enough. Bleske and Buss (2000) found that the female friend sees herself as getting physical protection and investment from the male (which the male sees as costs) while the male gets a potential sexual partner (which the female sees as a cost). Both sexes get somebody agreeable and dependable (Lewis et al., 2011). Interestingly, the male was more likely to still regard the relationship as merely a ‘friendship’ once it had turned sexual, implying that part of the motivation is sex without commitment – a ‘friend with benefits’ (Bleske & Buss, 2000).