Scientists: Symmetry of the face indicates the egoism of a person, and asymmetry - on a difficult childhood
Last reviewed: 20.11.2021
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Two papers describing individual relationships, among other things, show how complex a subject for scientific research is a person.
Recent and unrelated studies of the causes and consequences of symmetry / asymmetry of human faces are a curious diptych, showing ... Most likely, the ultimate complexity of a person - a biological and social being - as an object for study.
According to Santiago Sanchez-Pérez, who works at the Universities of Barcelona and Edinburgh, and Enrique Touregano, representing the Autonomous University of Madrid, the symmetry of the human face, which strongly correlates with his face, beauty, is connected with such a human trait as selfishness.
The scientists put a group of people participating in their experiment before the "dilemma of the prisoner". Each participant in a pair of conditional captives who did not communicate with each other chose between an altruistic and selfish decision; by conditions, the one who preferred a selfish decision in the expectation that the "partner" would choose an altruistic one won more. Then the researchers correlated the results of the responses with the symmetry of the subjects' subjects; it turned out that people with symmetrical faces (that is, beautiful) are more self-centered in their behavior.
Sanchez-Pérez and Turéggano explain the regularities discovered by them by biological factors: the other studies cited by them have found that people with symmetrical faces have fewer congenital diseases than the average human individual, and therefore (and because of their attractiveness) they are independent and need others less than these others need them.
Another study, conducted at the University of Edinburgh by a group led by Professor Ian Diary, relates the asymmetry of a person to a difficult childhood. Researchers examined 15 zones in the photo of 292 participants in the long-term monitoring of Lothian Birth Cohort 1921, made at the age of 83, and concluded that poverty and related factors (overcrowding, toilet in the yard, cigarette smoke, malnutrition, diseases ) leave an indelible mark on the face. Even if a person subsequently becomes rich (as the telepromader Gordon Ramsey and the artist Tracey Emin mentioned by the researchers), the asymmetry does not disappear.
Both works are supported by references to sources and the authors' own research; of course, there is a temptation to assume (since in the first case the symmetry of the face and its consequences are coordinated, and in the second case - the lack of symmetry and its causes) that people with a symmetrical face are more selfish, since they come from the "upper" social strata (whose representatives, according to one study, are less likely to cooperate with others). Nevertheless, our ("KL") observations of five generations of the same family show that the distinct asymmetry of the face (more precisely, the wings of the nose) can be hereditary, and not due to the individual development of the line. Obviously, the determinism of each human individual by biological and social, general and individual factors sets a degree of complexity that linear correlations can not be described.
The results of the research (1) will be presented at the meeting of Nobel laureates in Lindau and (2) published in the journal Economics and Human Biology.
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