Okay...So, I took a look at the photos of all those guys. The high openness guy & the low openness guy below him looked like clones of each other! Actually, all those guys looked like the same guy with slight changes I could not quite put a finger on. The low integrity (or whatever word they used) guy looked like a 5 Kg heavier version of the neurotic guy. The neurotic guy & Mr. Emotional Stability looked utterly identical to me as well. What I did notice in the photos, however, were some hairline configuration changes. Some of them have a straight hairline, sometimes it is slightly curved & in others it has a slight widow's peak.
Is there evidence of high reliability in this? It reminds me of old-fashioned head-lump reading & stereotypes that reflect cultural/ethnic aesthetic preferences. For instance, it used to be believed that people with lower hairlines were less intelligent. Bill Gates, Steven Hawking & Einstein have (had) comparatively lower foreheads. Large open (especially blue) eyes meant an honest, decent sort. Several of our era's most notorious serial killers had large blue eyes. THis misconception probably helped them con their victims into a false sense of safety! People who 'look you in the eye' were perceived as honest too. This led to prejudicial misunderstandings between Westerners & many Asians because in many Asian cultures, 'eyeballing' someone is considered to be rude: these people were not being dishonest: they were trying to show politeness!
Slanted/squinty looking eyes were considered duplicitous, dangerous & dishonest. Again, this was not a fact: just another Western prejudice. The same is true of what is called in the justice system, 'the halo effect'. We are so accustomed to images of hero/angel figures as having golden hair & blue eyes that blue-eyed defendants get significantly lighter sentences for the same crimes. They are seldom condemned to death even when the sentence is legally warranted. When they are witnesses in cases, they are more likely to be believed than are darker (even brunette, brown-eyed whites) witnesses. As is obvious, this leaves dark-skinned black guys with slanting eyes in deep doo-doo justice-wise! THese ingrained biases are so prevalent that police mount searches more rapidly when a little blonde girl disappears compared to when a brunette girl does. SCARY!!!
Many green-eyed redheads were burnt as witches because green eyes were reminiscent of cats, who were allegedly the devil's minions (Really! I $#!T you not!) & red hair was like hell-fire (the fact that fire of the same colour provided life-saving warmth & cooked their meals was lost on them...). Said green eyed unfortunates were also considered to be greedy & envious! The thicker lips of black men were taken as signs of rapacious sensuality, meaning they would lose all control & rape any white women (for some reason this only applied to an effect triggered by whit women...) they could get a hold of.
I'm extremely careful about any assumptions whatsoever about a person based upon their genetically-determined facial features. There was a woman in a class we teachers had to take at Uni recently as ordered by the education minister. You would swear up & down that she had Down Syndrome. She had the classic facial features of the syndrome. She wore thick glasses, had an oddly shaped head & head & jawline. She was trilingual & also had a MA in Education! She was just odd-looking!
Hollywood has also done a great disservice in perpetuating negative & fearsome stereotypes about unusual-looking people. Evil characters are often burn victims, walk with a limp or lurch, have asymmetrical features or have some other 'disfigurement'. Albinos, too, have been typecast. Think of all the movies you have seen where there is an evil genius bad guy. How often does said bad guy have an unusually articulate way of speaking (never trust anyone smarter than yourself: smart folks are tricky & nuts!) How often does that bad guy have a 'foreign' (read current or former enemy of America) accent? Often, the evil genius sounds vaguely British (like many of us Canucks) or East European. These subconscious responses to these traits do not seem to reflect any scientific realities, but years of conditioning & indoctrination with our culture's prejudices. If you go to another part of the world, as a woman, if you look a man in the eyes (& I do not mean flirtatiously or staring) it is taken to be a direct come-on! Seriously! As a woman, you must avert your glance. If you smile at all at one, it means the same thing. Overly large open eyes can indicate a greedy person. My husband is from a once Communist society. When he was growing up, a person who smiled was either not serious, a simpleton or a lunatic! A severe scowl was the right expression for both males & females. It just seems to me that the margin for error with face-reading would be too high.
