﻿In January this year, Netflix released a true crime documentary on Richard Ramirez,
the night stalker. During the early 80s he committed some of the most heinous crimes
in the state. In the interview with many of the surviving victims and court appearances,
many described his face as pure evil, quoted as how a cat views a mouse, predatory.
Interestingly enough, there’s a lot of truth to how the victims describe his face as
evil. As it turns out, certain human facial features have been linked to making a face
appear as more menacing. These are features that indicate high fighting success and testosterone,
leading to more aggressive indicators of facial dominance. An example would be facial
width to height ratio where short, broad midfaces are deemed as more intimidating,
aggressive compared to tall narrow ones. What you may not have known is that there are other
facial traits that we can subconsciously link to potential psychopathic behaviour.
The so-called Dark triad of personality traits can be written on the face.
Before we deep dive into the topic, let’s look at what the dark triad is. Paulhus and Williams 2002,
described it as exhibiting Psychopathy, Machiavellianism and Narcissism.
Psychopathy is described as emotionally cold, impulsive or antisocial behaviour by Hare
1996 Machiavellianism, named after its namesake Niccolò Machiavelli is characterised by cynicism,
a lack of faith in humanity and most importantly, a willingness to exploit others for personal gain.
Narcissism is associated with a sense of entitlement or an elevated sense of self-worth.
Each of these three traits share the same core tenant of callous and manipulative behaviour but
the question for our topic remains, how much of this is written on the face, if any?
Firstly, why do these traits matter? If displaying dark triad behaviour was
truly disadvantageous then a true psychopath would be able to mask their behaviour
for long enough to gain one’s trust, such as Ted Bundy. If it was truly advantageous, then others
would falsely mimic these behaviors to gain an inherent advantage. Past and present findings
show that it’s actually a bit of both. One self-reported study by Jonason and colleagues
in 2009 indicated that men who show more dark triad traits were better at acquiring short term
relationships. In 2015, he elaborated on that with another study indicating dark triad men
are better at acquiring resources which makes them attractive.
Conversely, those resources have to come from somewhere, so for every winner there’s a loser.
A basic social challenge for all of us are developing ways to detect manipulative behaviour
to avoid being cheated out. Early studies on dark triad detection
have looked at clothing choices, facial expressions, and body language, in other
words methods of self-expressiovn, however these studies had too much variability. What’s
to say what a psychopath’s preferred clothes are? You probably wouldn’t be able to tell.
Instead, craniofacial structure, as strange as that may sound, is a better indicator of
detecting potentially harmful strangers, as that is one facet that cannot be easily changed.
Existing research has looked at the dominance spectrum displayed
through facial cues. Going back to our initial example, a short wide midface of a UFC fighter
is much more dominant and intimidating than the tall narrow one of say Benedict Cumberbatch. This
has been linked to higher testosterone males by Carre Et al 2009 and Perret Et al 1998
which is partially responsible for increased dark triad behaviour.
Holtzman 2011 tries to link the face to the personality and finally answer our question.
A sample size of around 200 participants were given a personality quiz used to detect dark
triad traits. From this, the bottom 10 and top 10 for each trait and gender
had their faces photographed and composited into a prototypical face to understand similarities.
Observers were brought in, with 64% being women to identify which faces appear most sinister.
The results indicate that the guesses were not made at random with the majority of the
observers being in agreement with the same few set of faces. If we compare the least trustworthy
composites with the greatest thrill seeking and impulsive ones, we start to see some similarity,
especially with decreasing trust and increasing impulsivity. These faces are more masculine
angular and short and this should come as no surprise given the research literature
on the topic and even some of the videos where we’ve touched on it. What the results suggest,
is that the detection of these traits is A) not random and B) not entirely exclusive either.
Certain faces showed up more for all 3 traits than others, indicating that the detection of these
traits comes as a package. A Machivellian face that sets of alarm bells would also be classified
as a Psychopathic or Narcissistic one too. Holtzman’s paper tries to explain these facial
features with one of two hypotheses. The first being that psychological and physical traits
come as a package. For instance a sharp faced woman may inherit genes that help her build an
angular craniofacial structure but this comes with dark triad traits, perhaps influenced all the way
down to a hormonal level during development. The second is that this sharp faced woman acquired
these traits through social experiences, giving the example of women with more dominant i.e.
angular facial features rising to leadership positions more readily than those with softer
features. The personality is simply a reaction to their features and the way people treat
them. Another more relevant example would be developing these dark traits as a response to
overabundant attention, in this case, male attention and so an exploitative attitude
towards others is simply a defence mechanism to keep that unwanted attention at bay. Effy
Stonem from Skins is an example, being cold and manipulative due to her distrust in people.
This second hypothesis is very interesting. The dark triad and mate choice by Jonason
and colleagues 2015 found that women high in these psychopathic traits preferred short term partners
also high in them too. If the second hypothesis is true, then this timeless preference in bad men and
women has a lot to do with the amount of attention the subject receives, the quality of their social
interactions and to a lesser extent, their facial attractiveness and features. Quite frankly,
the features that make men appear more dangerous are the ones that also make them more attractive.
That’s not to say that everyone prefers these dark triad partners,
but if you’re going after them then its likely you share some of those traits
Prolific criminals such as Richard Ramirez and Ted Bundy had diehard groupies and female fans
who would follow them in their court hearings and defend their innocence,
despite being the target group that these killers would actually hunt down.
This idea of hybristophilia ties back into dark triad traits and partner selection because what
better way to display psychopathy than to kill. Part of the attraction was due to their crimes and
part due to their dark triad facial features. Men such as Jeffrey Dahmer, Bundy and Ramirez
had incredibly well developed lower thirds with above average facial width and proportion
and are not the exception. In the same way that we covered how political leaders and CEOs have
above average features in this video, the same applies to the extremes on the other
side of the lawless coin. American Psycho puts it best with their typecast of Christian Bale,
someone who presents the handsome features of both the CEO or the Vice president in this case,
but also the psychopathic killer. Both roles require dark triad traits by nature.