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People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks

economist.com

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Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks

#11

Post by kurtosis »

Ah this is truly a business opportunity - a nice supplement to your FICO score forget mechanical turk:

Step (1): Get access to frontal photographs of a large random sample of borrowers along with their financial history and records of any defaults.

Step (2): Extract a vector of facial features from each photo. Similar to the feature vectors used to judge attractiveness in the work of Cohen-Or et al. http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~dcor/

Step (3): Have users apply for a loan by submitting a mugshot. Use support vector regression or some other similar technique to predict the probability of default.

Step (4): Profit

Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks

#13

Post by [deleted] »

lunchbox wrote: post #5

Other 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…

[deleted]

Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks

#14

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #13
lunchbox wrote: post #5

Other 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…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks

#16

Post by imp »

ars wrote: post #8
imp wrote: post #4

Their 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.

Oh, I see now. Makes sense. Thanks.

Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks

#17

Post by nazgulnarsil »

lunchbox wrote: post #5

Other 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…

but if this became widespread it would then become advantageous to be able to fool other people's sense of trustworthiness by displaying the trustworthy physical characteristics while actually being untrustworthy. ad infinitum...

Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks

#18

Post by lunchbox »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #17
lunchbox wrote: post #5

Other 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…

but if this became widespread it would then become advantageous to be able to fool other people's sense of trustworthiness by displaying the trustworthy physical characteristics while actually being untrustworthy. ad infinitum...

Excellent point! The old evolutionary arms race.

I think in the end, the set of genes that wins this game of cat and mouse will be the one that has the strongest selection pressure. For example, being able to detect untrustworthy people might increase my survival chances by x%, and being able to fool people might increase my survival chances by y%. If x >> y, then one would expect that most modern-day humans would be good at sniffing out untrustworthy people; if y >> x, then modern-day humans would have difficulty doing this, since the untrustworthy people have evolved an extremely strong ability to escape detection.

Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks

#19

Post by rsheridan6 »

But do we react to the underlying physiognomy or the muscle tone (posture and expressions on their faces)? It would be hard to separate these two factors, but you could start by generating 3D faces with different physiognomy but the same neutral expression.

Re: People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks

#20

Post by forgotpasswd »

Makes sense: * If I'm usually hiding something, my muscle memory will keep my face in that shape * If I'm usually open, vice versa Of course if I really believe stealing is good, my face will be open. So it's basically showing others what I believe about myself.
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