Studying the relationship between facial features and race is a topic spanning multiple disciplines, from aesthetic and reconstructive medicine to anthropology and computer science. Face structure, feature dimensions, and proportions have been used as identifiers of beauty and racial demographics, despite unclear understanding.
The concept of racial demographics, grouping individuals by their perceived biology physical traits, is outdated. People from all around the world are mixing and having children who do not have features of 1 demographic, but of many. Furthermore, if 1 looks into the diversity within such racial clusters, such as “Asian-Indian,” it is hard to comprehend how a country with almost 1.5 billion people,2 20% of the world's entire population, could be considered 1 racial demographic. It shares land borders with 7 other nations: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, with population features varying hugely within a country.
Categorizing by racial demographic has been used universally, utilizing the knowledge that different racial groups often show a degree of differentiation in their facial morphology. The advent of modern computer technology and advances in imaging techniques have allowed researchers to create mathematical models to quantify and compare these differences, as well as create “average” facial meshes that can be used as references. While important to study particular anatomical regions within the face, 1 must not forget to consider the face in its entirety, as this is how we each perceive facial morphology.
For example, Chinese individuals in general have wider noses than Caucasians, but this increase in width is blended by the proportionately increased intercanthal distance, resulting in harmonious facial proportions. Another example would be the width of the mouth relative to intercanthal distance. This proportion is thought to be less relevant as individuals do not look at the mouth and eyes at the same time. Understanding how individuals from different racial backgrounds age can also aid aesthetic surgeons when performing rejuvenation therapies.
Facial Features
Perceptions and Stereotypes
Faces judged as stereotypically Black are perceived negatively relative to less stereotypical faces. Dominance is a first-impression trait that is cued by facial structure and is associated with threat and criminality.
In an experiment, artificial faces were constructed to manipulate facial features to study the relations among perceived dominance, threat, and Black stereotypicality. People were shown faces with different combinations and variations, of facial features typically associated with stereotypicality; nose width, lip fullness, and variations in skin tone (here manipulated as reflectance; shadowing and texture). After presentation, people judged how well each face represented the three factors of interest (traits).
Results showed that stereotypicality was related to wide nose and darker reflectance and to a lesser extent full lips; threat was associated with wide nose, thin lips, and low reflectance; dominance was mainly related to nose width. People were influenced by the facial features when making trait judgments, while the demographics of the perceiver (race, age, gender), did not change how the faces were judged. These results suggest that the extent to which people perceive dominance, threat, and stereotypicality as related, may underpin some of the sociocultural disparities in treatment of certain individuals in an applied context.
People judge faces quickly, making first impression judgments in as little as 100 ms. Speeded judgments are often biased and based on little or no information about actual behavior. Instead, people form impressions of one another and assume character traits based in part on facial structure and the extent to which facial cues support preconceived expectations for behavior. Face judgment research finds commonalities in facial structure that lead to judgments of dominance, trustworthiness, and a variety of other trait-based assumptions. These judgments may play a role in how people are perceived and may relate to important applied decisions, such as political elections, military rank, and court system outcomes relating to sentence severity and guilty verdicts.
The focus of current studies is to identify facial features associated with assumed behavioral traits that underpin biased judgments of Black individuals. Black men, specifically, are vulnerable to face-type bias and assumed criminality due to associations with the Black man criminal stereotype. Black men with stereotypically Black features are often judged more negatively and more criminal in real-world and laboratory settings than are their counterparts who possess more atypical features. For example, Black men who were misidentified as the perpetrator in a crime, incarcerated, and later exonerated based on DNA evidence (i.e., factually innocent), were judged by an independent sample of people as being more stereotypically Black.
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Discussions around what drives this bias suggest that stereotypically Black features may activate negative racial stereotypes that can result in associations with fear. A body of research is focused on identifying what aspects of a Black face lead to negative associations for White participants. Some studies find that darker skin tone is what drives the effect. Alternatively, some research suggests that facial features and skin tone are used together, while others argue that they are used independently to inform these negative associations.
One study did test specific features to determine prototypicality for several race groups. Results for Black faces showed that facial metrics had the biggest influence on White perceivers’ prototypicality ratings, while skin tone was consistently impactful for Black and Korean perceivers. Black face prototypicality was not specifically identified by metrics; however, relative to White faces, Black faces were rated as having a wider nose, thicker lips, and a wider jawline.
People have stereotypes about what makes a criminal face: they have long, shaggy, dark hair; tattoos; beady eyes; pockmarks; and scars. Faces rated high in criminality may also be identified from police lineups on appearance alone, and such a response is associated with Criminal face-type bias. Similarly, participants making speeded first impression judgments of convict faces revealed that criminality was determined immediately and was related to judgments of low trustworthiness and high dominance.
One idea is that people infer personality traits from the similarity of a person’s facial features to emotional expressions (i.e., the Emotion Overgeneralization hypothesis). Emotionally neutral faces that look angry are perceived high in dominance, while neutral faces that appear happy are perceived as trustworthy. Results showed that, regardless of face group, both male and female faces that were judged high in criminality were also judged as high in dominance and low in trustworthiness, with angry faces being perceived as the most dominant. This suggests that a possible cue to determining that a face is threatening (i.e., associated with fear) and also criminal, is the extent to which the face looks dominant.
Features of faces associated with happiness and anger (i.e., valence) are overgeneralized to determine whether a person is trustworthy and should be approached or avoided. Facial features that appear dominant (e.g., looking more masculine or mature) are used to evaluate physical strength. Assessments of threat derived from facial appearance are negatively associated with perceptions of trustworthiness and positively associated with perceptions of dominance.
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It is well established what makes a face dominant, trustworthy, and threatening; what is less clear is what features or combination of features, makes a face stereotypically Black, and how those features may relate to these other traits. The plan is to evaluate whether specific facial features, or combinations of features, considered stereotypically Black are also associated with dominance and threat.
It is hypothesized that Black stereotypicality, dominance, and threat will be positively related traits. To test this expectation, the focus will be on three main aims: (1) to examine how lip width, nose width, and skin reflectance correspond to ratings of dominance, threat, and stereotypicality; (2) to examine the extent to which rater characteristics may affect face ratings; (3) to evaluate the extent to which ratings of dominance, threat, and stereotypicality are related to each other after accounting for the effects of facial features and rater demographics.
Together these results will help to determine whether some of the bias found in judgments of more versus less-stereotypically Black faces are underpinned by feature judgments that are afforded to all faces with these features.
Moreover, this work addresses the need for face perception research to extend beyond primarily White samples as the fluidity of face judgments maybe based on context and the racial group that one identifies with.
Does Facial Recognition Technology Promote Racial Bias?
Historical Context: Blackface and Minstrelsy
The first minstrel shows were performed in 1830s New York by white performers with blackened faces (most used burnt cork or shoe polish) and tattered clothing who imitated and mimicked enslaved Africans on Southern plantations. These performances characterized blacks as lazy, ignorant, superstitious, hypersexual, and prone to thievery and cowardice.
Thomas Dartmouth Rice, known as the “Father of Minstrelsy,” developed the first popularly known blackface character, “Jim Crow” in 1830. Blackface performances grew particularly popular between the end of the Civil War and the turn-of-the century in Northern and Midwestern cities, where regular interaction with African Americans was limited.
The influence of minstrelsy and racial stereotyping on American society cannot be overstated. New media ushered minstrel performances from the stage, across radio and television airwaves, and into theaters. Blackface and the codifying of blackness- language, movement, deportment, and character-as caricature persists through mass media and in public performances today.
In addition to the increased popularity of “black” Halloween costumes, colleges and universities across the country continue to battle against student and professor blackface performances.
Race as a Social Construct
Scientists have known for many decades that there is little correlation between “race,” used in its popular sense, and actual physical variations in the human species. In the United States, for example, the people historically identified as African Americans do not share a common set of physical characteristics. There is a greater range of skin colors, hair colors and textures, facial features, body sizes, and other physical traits in this category than in any other human aggregate identified as a single race.
Features of African Americans vary from light skin, blue or gray eyes, and blond hair to dark skin, black eyes, and crinkly hair and include every range and combination of characteristics in between. American custom has long classified any person with known African ancestry as Black, a social mandate often called the “one-drop rule.” This principle not only attests to the arbitrary nature of Black racial identity, but it was also presumed to keep those classified as racially “white” pure and untainted by the “blood” of low-status and inferior races.
This rule has not typically applied to other “racial” mixtures, such as children born of white and Asian parents, although some of these children have suffered discrimination because of physical similarities to their lower-status parent. All this gives clear evidence of the socially arbitrary nature of race categories in North America.
Other types of anomalies have frequently appeared in efforts to classify “racial” populations around the world. Whereas British scholars, for example, tend to separate Indians into their own racial category (during the colonial period, natives of India, Burma, Melanesia, and Australia were, and still are, called “Blacks”), American scholars have usually included Indians in the “Caucasian” category to differentiate them from Black Americans, although some Indians-especially those with very dark skin tones-have experienced color discrimination in the United States.
Since World War II, travel and immigration have greatly increased the contact of Western peoples with a wide variety of peoples throughout the world. Contact with peoples of the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, as well as with peoples from several areas of Africa and the Middle East, has shown that most of these people do not neatly fit into existing racial stereotypes. Some appear to Westerner as having a mixture of Asian and African or European and African physical characteristics. Others, such as Melanesians, can easily be mistaken for Africans or Black Americans.
More anomalous for Western racial categorization are Indigenous Australian peoples, some of whom have light or blond wavy hair combined with dark skin. Many Americans are recognizing that the social categories of race as evolved in the United States are inadequate for encompassing such peoples who, indeed, do not share the social history of racial minorities in the United States.
In the 1950s and ’60s the United States began experiencing an influx of new immigrants from Latin America. Spanish and Portuguese colonial societies exhibited very different attitudes toward physical differences. Even before Christopher Columbus set sail, the Mediterranean world had long been a world of heterogeneous peoples. Africans, southern Europeans, and peoples of the Middle East have interacted and interbred over thousands of years, as long as humans have occupied these regions.
The Iberian peoples brought their customs and habits to the New World. There, as described above, intermating among Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans soon began to produce a population of “mixed” peoples. The descendants of these peoples who entered the United States since the mid-20th century further confound “racial” categories for those who believe in them.
Military personnel fighting in the Persian Gulf region were startled to see that many Saudi Arabians, Yemenis, Omanis, and other peoples in the Middle East resembled African Americans or Africans in their skin color, hair texture, and facial features. Many Southeast Asians and Middle Easterners have found that they are frequently mistaken for being Black in America. Some Native Americans are mistaken for being Chinese, Japanese, or a part of another Asian ethnic group on the basis of their skin color, eye structure, and hair color and texture. Some Central and South Americans and many Puerto Ricans are perceived as Arabs. In like manner, many Arab and Iranian Americans are thought to be Latinos. “Race” is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder.
