Baby-Face Bias

Baby-face bias, also called the babyface overgeneralization effect, is the tendency to attribute childlike personality traits, such as naivety, warmth, weakness, and submissiveness, to adults whose faces happen to display babyish features, including a round shape, large eyes, high raised eyebrows, a small nose, and a narrow chin, regardless of that person's actual age, personality, or ability. The social psychologist Leslie Zebrowitz has conducted extensive research documenting the bias, finding that people consistently rate more babyfaced adults as more naive, more honest, kinder and more trustworthy, but also as physically weaker, less dominant and less competent, than adults with more mature, angular facial features, and that this same overgeneralization appears across diverse cultures and across people of different races, suggesting the perceptual trigger operates fairly automatically rather than depending on any particular cultural stereotype about faces. The bias has been documented to carry real practical consequences across a wide range of social outcomes, including political elections, in which candidates with more mature-looking faces are more likely to win, along with financial decisions, hiring evaluations, academic assessments, criminal sentencing outcomes, and everyday judgments about how much to trust or help a given person, making facial babyishness itself a meaningful, if largely unconscious, input into how people are judged and treated by others.