People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks
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Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks
#2Preventing emotion from showing on your face is nearly impossible. If you try to hold a smile you don't actually feel, it is not difficult to others to notice intuitively. They may not realize exactly what aspects of your face didn't match up to the smile, but often they'll be able to observe that the eyes didn't look right.
So I'm not all that surprised, really. Ability to recognize and read faces, along with ability to recognize vocal stress, are both important skills for a human.
Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks
#3Preventing emotion from showing on your face is nearly impossible. If you try to hold a smile you don't actually feel, it is not difficult to others to notice intuitively. They may not realize exactly what aspects of your face didn't match up to the smile, but often they'll be able to observe that the eyes didn't look right. So I'm not all that surprised, really. Ability to recognize and read faces, along with abilit…
Most pictures probably aren't taken with the express purpose of showing them on the site.
It might be a couple of other things: first aspects of his background that are discernable through a picture, and second that person's idea of what constitutes a "proper" picture for this site.
The most interesting thing I learned is that there are these kind of sites...
Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks
#4Their test subjects came from Mechanical Turk. Is that considered reliable? I'm skeptical. And if they were using Mechanical Turk, why didn't they get 1000 subjects instead of just 25?
Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks
#5Other factors to control for include piercings, haircut, facial hair, glasses, makeup, any clothes in the picture (shirt/hat), hygiene, and tattoos.
However, it really wouldn't surprise me if some aspects of personality can, on average, be discerned from facial appearances. In hunter-gatherer days, being able to make an accurate snap judgment of a stranger's trustworthiness would be a big evolutionary advantage. And it wouldn't surprise me either if genes that affect one's personality (e.g. those relating to testosterone) affect one's appearance as well.
Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks
#6Or maybe just the people with worse scores have the most need for money and fewer options, and thus look more desperate.
Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks
#7Their test subjects came from Mechanical Turk. Is that considered reliable? I'm skeptical. And if they were using Mechanical Turk, why didn't they get 1000 subjects instead of just 25?
I agree that Mechanical Turk is a huge red flag as far as quality goes, but 1000 subjects looking at 6,821 loan applications could get fairly expensive. That is 6,821,000 *(number of questions per loan app and it looks like seven factors just from the article) HITS. This could be fairly costly depending on the price that the researchers set per question.
Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks
#8Their test subjects came from Mechanical Turk. Is that considered reliable? I'm skeptical. And if they were using Mechanical Turk, why didn't they get 1000 subjects instead of just 25?
I think you got it backward, read it again. He used the Mechanical Turk to put a number on each face rather than just yes/no. He then compared the results with actual loan applications, and found that it correlated pretty well.
Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks
#9[deleted]
Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks
#10Another sensational news of Nazi-Science from the economist. Recently they also wrote about better sperm of the rich people.
Stephen Hawking must be lucky like hell that The Economist isn't estimating his creditwothness...