We Don't Look How We Think We Look

by Monica Joshi

Pictures are worth a thousand words. Sometimes, they are worth Photoshop and blatant lies about how good you look when you actually don't look that good. Yeah, that smudge on your face that you wanted so badly to Photoshop out, it might just make you unique, i.e. you. According to a new study from the UNSW in Australia, we are so poor at picking good likenesses of our face, that even strangers can make better selections.

This is just one of the findings of a study by Dr. David White and colleagues published on Wednesday 24 June 2015, in the British Journal of Psychology. The study was supported by Australian Research Council grants and funding from the Australian Passport Office.

With regards to strangers picking better likeness photos, White said that:

“In face-to-face encounters with unfamiliar people, it is often necessary to verify that we are who we claim to be. For example, we are asked to prove our identity when processing financial transactions and crossing borders. In these and many other commonplace situations, photo ID is the most common method for identity verification. However, despite the clear importance of this visual task, previous research has shown that we are quite poor when matching photos of unfamiliar faces.”

In the first part of the study, a group of over 130 undergraduate students downloaded 10 suitable photos of themselves from Facebook. They then ranked them in order of the best to worst likeness. These participants took part in a minute-long webcam video of their face, and two still photos were also taken. In one, they were smiling, and in the other, they had a neutral expression.

In the second part of the study, sixteen participants who did not know the students watched the webcam videos. They were then asked to rank the Facebook photos in order of resemblance to the person they had seen in the video. In the final part of the study, another 73 participants were then recruited to complete an online face-matching test.

Results of the study showed that the unfamiliar participants chose a different set of ‘good likeness’ images compared to those that people had selected of themselves. Surprisingly, the images selected by strangers led to better performance on the online face-matching test. The size of the advantage in other-selection over self-selection was considerably great. The self-selected images were matched seven per cent less accurately compared to other-selected images.

With regards to expressions in photographs, such as smiling or frowning, White said:

“Interestingly we also noted there were better results when people were smiling in the photos. It is interesting that current passport guidelines prohibit smiling in photographs because this ‘distorts the normal facial features’. Given that faces are generally pictured smiling, and these images are rated as being more like familiar faces, it may be beneficial to permit expression in passport photographs.”

These results might help explain why we, especially 20-somethings, sometimes get carded and fail the identity test based on our IDs, as we select which photos are used in passports or other government-issued pieces of I.D. It might also be interesting to see this research used in criminology, to detect whether persons who look similar can get away with identity theft.