 So let me just welcome you all today so this is our UWA weekly webinar series which we call the Science Exchange and the idea here is that we want to promote the relevance of our UWA research and our teaching activities to you all and we particularly call it the Science Exchange because the idea is that we really want to hear your questions and comments as much as sharing our thoughts with you so we'll be really keen to hear your questions. My name is Linda Jeffrey I'm a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology of Psychological Science at UWA. I'm also the Director of Community Engagement there. It's now my pleasure to introduce you to Gemma Colova who is our speaker for today. Now Gemma is a postdoctoral research associate in the Person Perception Lab in the School of Psychological Science and her research focuses on understanding how adults form first impressions of children's faces and she's also interested in how children themselves learn to form these impressions of other faces. Gemma is a recent graduate with a PhD from this university and her PhD thesis was pretty fabulous. It was awarded an honourable mention on the Dean's List at UWA and that is a fairly rare honour. Just before Gemma gets started on her presentation she just wants you to know that in today's talk she's not going to be showing you a lot of data or statistics that actually support the research that she will be presenting just to keep it clean and easy to follow for those who aren't familiar with that kind of stuff but there will be links available to the research and if anyone is really interested in the data Gemma will be more than happy to talk with you about that at another time. Okay so without further ado I'm now going to hand you over to Gemma who's going to be talking about first impressions and why they matter. Thanks so much Linda and with that I think I just jumped straight into today's talk. So you probably all heard the saying don't judge a book by its cover or looks can be deceiving or beauty is only skin deep. Well despite this advice we actually can't help but form really rapid judgments of character just based on the glimpse of a stranger's face. So for example when seeing this face you might make assumptions about how trustworthy this person looks whether they look intelligent whether they look approachable and what we know is that we've formed these impressions within milliseconds of seeing a face and we actually can't help but make this really just rapid judgments of character just based on a stranger's face and what's also really interesting is that we actually tend to agree with other people when we form these impressions and I'm just going to I guess show you a demonstration of this now. So I'm going to show you two faces and if you can just look at them for a moment and then hopefully a poll will pop up soon and then we'll ask you to choose which face you think looks more trustworthy the face on the left or the face on the right. Alright so we can have a look at those results now. We can see that 94% of you thought the face on the right looked more trustworthy and now we'll just go to a second demonstration using some slightly different faces. So again if we can just get that poll up in a minute that will ask you whether you think the face on the left or the face on the right looks more trustworthy. So again now we can see the majority of people so 97% of you thought the face on the left looked more trustworthy this time. So maybe you felt in doing this exercise that these impressions you know they came really easily. It didn't really take much effort to think about which face you thought looked more trustworthy and as I mentioned earlier we tend to agree with others when forming these impressions so they're not really random impressions that we make. So today I'm going to be talking a bit more about these sorts of facial first impressions. I'm going to talk about why these impressions are so important. How we form these impressions from adult and child faces. Whether or not these impressions that are at all accurate and where these impressions actually come from. So these impressions are really important to understand because we know that they have a range of real world social consequences. And it might be completely obvious to some of you that more attractive people are generally more popular in online dating. It's one things like Tinder. But these first impressions also have a range of social consequences that probably seem a bit less obvious or a bit more irrational. So for example, we also know that unattractive defendants are more likely to lose cases in the criminal justice system. And we also form impressions other than attractiveness. So more subjective impressions from faces like how trustworthy someone looks. And these sorts of impressions also have real world consequences. So we know that more trustworthy looking Airbnb hosts are generally more popular on Airbnb and they can charge higher rates for their accommodation. And the hats of relevance of some of you listening in today, we also know that trustworthy looking researchers are generally perceived as doing good science. So that dodgy photo view on Research Gate might actually be doing not very good things for your reputation. And we also know that competent looking CEOs are more likely to be hired by large companies and they also receive larger salaries. So it's quite clear that these first impressions that we just make from a glimpse of a face have a range of social consequences. And these actually start quite early. So we know that even children are influenced by these impressions. So for example, we know that attractive children are perceived by smart and smart and popular by teachers. And on the other hand, unattractive children are more likely to receive harsh discipline. And these social consequences are especially important to understand in childhood because this is such a crucial time of development. And any influence during childhood could actually have long term effects. So for example, we know that attracted children are generally perceived as more smart by their teachers. They might actually be given more challenging tasks by their teachers and then actually give them more opportunities to excel and can end up becoming more smart because of this impression. And this is something that we refer to as the self fulfilling prophecy effect. So of course, it's really important that we understand how we form these impressions from both adult and child faces. So how do we form these impressions? Well, this actually isn't a really easy question to answer. And when you think about all the words that you could use to describe someone just based on your first impression of them, there are hundreds of words that can come to mind. And it's not immediately obvious how these words relate to one another, or which of these words are most important in driving our impressions. And I guess as researchers, we want to, you know, make some sense of this in a scientific way. And we want to get a deeper understanding of any patterns that might underlie these sorts of impressions. So really influential paper aimed to understand what how do we actually form these impressions from adult places? And what are the most kind of important impressions that we that we form? And what they've found was that all of these judgments from adult faces really just boiled down to two main judgments. And they were how trustworthy and adult looked and how dominant and adult looked. And since the discovery of these two important impressions, researchers have also been able to visualize these impressions by using face morphs. So here we've got two faces and they're morphs of faces, really. And for the technically minded, how we create these morphs is we really just merge together and morph together faces that receive really high ratings of trust worthiness. And these faces receive the highest ratings of trustworthiness out of the thousand faces. So that's the face on the right, whereas the face on the left is a morph that's being created by faces that received quite low impressions of trustworthiness. So basically, these morphs just kind of provide a really neat way of visualizing what these dimensions look like. And you can see here that there are some common features that we associate with people who look trustworthy. So, for example, having a smile on your face makes you look more trustworthy and also being a bit more feminine, whereas the untrustworthy face has a bit more of a natural downward turn of the lip and they're a bit more masculine looking. And we can also use these morphs to visualize dominance. So the face on the right here is a face that is, I guess, an average, quite dominant looking face. So again, we can see this face is quite masculine. It's got quite clear jawline, whereas the face on the left, which is less dominant, is a little bit more round. And what's really interesting about these two impressions is that it's argued that together they give us information about someone's potential for threat. So I guess what this means is when we look at a face for the first time, all of this information is telling us whether someone might be threatening towards us, so whether they might have good or bad intentions and whether they might be able to fulfill those intentions. And it's probably quite easy to think about how inferring threat from other adult spaces would be important for our ancestors. So for example, we probably would update our behavior based on these impressions. So we might want to avoid someone that looks a bit more threatening, whereas we could approach someone that looks less threatening. But threat isn't really something that's important for every relationship or for every face that we look at. And I guess one of the most obvious examples could be thinking of children's faces. So we know that adults don't associate threat with children, but instead it's really important for adults to kind of establish a nurturing and caring relationship with kids. So this raises an interesting question about whether the threat dimensions of trust and dominance that we know are important for adults would also apply to kids' faces or whether we might expect different impressions to be important for those faces. And this is kind of I guess a motivator of one of my first research pieces which looked at well how do we actually form impressions from kids' faces? And to try and investigate this in a scientific way, what we do is we ask people just to write down their first impressions based on an image of a child's face, like you can see here. And this method is the same method that was used to find out the important impressions of adult faces, but obviously here we just use kids' faces. So we asked participants about their first impressions and we didn't specifically ask them to tell us about the personality or the trait characteristics of the kids. So if they wanted to, participants could have just explained, you know, the appearance of the children. So for this image they could have written young girl with blue eyes and freckles. But actually what we find is that participants go beyond just describing the physical appearance and they actually infer personality or trait characteristics from these still images. So one participant wrote shy, innocent, sweet, kind of average intelligence. And for another face, someone else wrote this kid looks a bit like a bully, although he looks quite confident as well. So we can see that just based on an image of a face, people make these really elaborate descriptions and we feel like we can tell something about someone's personality. And what we did was we looked at the words that participants were frequently mentioning to describe these sorts of traits. And as you can see here, the words that are larger were just words that were more frequently mentioned by participants. So participants mentioned things like troublemakers, serious, shy, and sweet quite frequently. And what we wanted to know, what do these impressions boil down to? What are the most important impressions for cute spaces? And what we found was that there were again two main impressions that emerged for cute spaces. The first was based on how nice the kid looked. So whether they looked nice or naughty. And these images here are pictures of kids that were generally rated quite high for looking quite nice, whereas these kids are a little bit more naughty looking. And the second impression was how shy the kids looked. So again, here are just some typical shy looking kids, whereas here are some less shy kids or more confident. And this finding was quite interesting because at a glance it looks like these impressions that we form of kids' faces are different to the trustworthiness and dominance impressions that we know are important for adult spaces. But of course we really wanted to test whether or not they were the same or different. So for example, we can see some similarities between niceness and trustworthiness. So a smile signals niceness and trust. So we just wanted to check that these weren't different words for the same kind of judgment. And what we found in fact was that niceness impressions were really similar to trust impressions. So this kind of means that we probably make assumptions about how good or bad someone looks just based on their face. But we call this kind of slightly different things in kids compared to adults. We call, we more think about it in terms of niceness for kids. But for the second dimension, what we found was that shyness wasn't the same as dominance and it also wasn't just the polar opposite of dominance either. But instead it was something that was a little bit more distinct. And this was interesting because it just supports that idea that perhaps the sorts of ways that we think about kids and the goals or the social goals that we have in that nurturing relationship we have towards kids is able to influence or shape the impressions that we form. And it's not really to do with threat for children but perhaps it's more to do with something like how socially competent or vulnerable that child is. So after discovering that impressions of niceness and shyness were really important for kids' faces, the next really important question is well do these impressions affect how we behave towards children? So you can imagine how this can be really important you know in the real world for example when when teachers interact with kids in that first day of school. So teachers are thinking about kids in terms of how nice or shy they look. We want to know whether these impressions actually bias how those teachers behave towards the kids. So to investigate how we might kind of behave differently towards kids based on their appearance we use this face editing or face transforming technique. So as you can see here this was a young photo of myself and we can use this face editing technique that can turn the same face image and make it look more nice or make it look less nice by making it look more like those averages that I spoke about earlier. And on the left hand side there you can just see and that's kind of exactly how we how we do this in the face programming. So you put the little like I guess dots and then important features of the face and you can transform the face to look more or less nice. So we've then asked participants for which child would you be most likely to give an award to for good behavior and we found that participants chose the face that looked more nice and we can also do the same thing editing the faces to make them look more or less shy and we asked which child would you choose to leave the class discussion and again we find that people tend to choose the face that looks less shy. So this result was quite important because it shows that not only do we form these spontaneous impressions from kids faces but we use these impressions to really influence our expectations of kids and also potentially how we behave towards them as well. So just to recap where we're at so far we know that impressions of nicest and shyness are the two most important impressions for kids faces and we also know that these impressions influence our behavior towards kids. So the next important question is well are these impressions accurate? Should we be relying on these impressions in the real world? And the question of whether or not these impressions are accurate is actually not a new question and in fact in the 1900s there was this guide written to help people detect a deceitful eye. So we can see here that an eye like this will represent a character that is positive positively deceitful and we can also see warnings for a chin as well and I hope it doesn't take too much convincing for you to believe me when I say that we cannot really read a person's character just from their face. So it's not as easy as just looking at someone and knowing whether or not they might be good or bad or deceitful. But what's interesting is that research today is kind of still looking at whether there might be a slither of truth or a kernel of truth in these impressions and actually what it finds is that there is actually some evidence that there might be a small amount of modest accuracy. So for example evidence shows that facial bone structure predicts aggressive play in male hockey players and other evidence has found that impressions of unfaithfulness predicts self-reported cheating behaviors in men. But this issue is a little bit contentious so not all studies have found significant accuracy in impressions and in fact there was another study which was quite a large study and they found that there was no relationship between cheating behaviors and the appearance of the participants. So it is kind of still debated in face perception literature whether or not there's even a kernel of truth in these impressions. So in some of our own research we wanted to know well might there also be any or might there be any accuracy in impressions of niceness and shyness for kids' faces because these are the impressions that we know are most important for children. So to look at this question what we did was we collected images of children's faces and to do this we just asked parents to send in photographs of their children and these were typically just photos that they already had on their phone and we also had information from those parents about the shy and nice behaviors of those kids. So for example we asked parents how frequently does your child help kids younger than themselves and that was a question that we wanted to use to measure niceness. And what we found was well the reports from the parents about how the kids behave so how nice those kids might behave in real life actually related to how nice the kids looked in the images suggesting that there might be this small amount I guess small kernel of truth in impressions of niceness and we did the same for shyness but what we found here was that there was no significant relationship. So what this means really is that what kids looked like or how shy they looked in the images didn't really relate to how shy their parents reported them as behaving and this result I guess raises a really interesting and important question and that is well why might there even be a kernel of truth in some of these impressions and one explanation is something that I kind of mentioned earlier and that's the self-fulfilling prophecy effect. So perhaps kids who look nice might be treated more positively and then in turn develop into nicer children later on. Another explanation is that there could be something in the face itself that is actually signaling this accurate information and of course that would be really interesting to find out well what is it in the face that that could be signaling whether or not a kid is nice and I guess another thing to keep in mind is the way that we collected these images in our study at least was we asked parents to just send you natural photographs of their kids. So another possibility is that more nice kids might just be more likely to smile for their parents or just might have been captured in a more happy kind of mannerism I guess than kids who are not nice. So it's really important to think about all the reasons why these impressions sometimes might contain some accuracy because from a theoretical perspective it's interesting to understand well where does this accuracy kind of come from but from a practical perspective it's really important to emphasize that when we talk about accuracy we're talking above chance levels so not every participant formed accurate impressions and even for those participants who did form accurate impressions they were certainly not at levels that suggests we should be relying on these impressions in everyday life. So so basically these impressions aren't accurate enough to be relying on them and of course this is really important when we think about all the social kind of consequences of these impressions. So if anything we should be we should think about them in terms of visual biases rather than things that we should be judging or trusting when we behave towards others and then just the final part of today's talk I'm just going to talk about the origin of impressions and so where do these impressions come from because obviously this is really important to understand given all the social consequences and to look at where these impressions might come from a lot of researchers that get examine kids impressions because if children form mature impressions that would suggest that it doesn't really take much social experience for us to form these impressions but they kind of come quite naturally. So what researchers found is that actually infants is young as seven months old are sensitive to facial trustworthiness. So infants actually prefer looking at faces that look more trustworthy. Another research has found that children by the time they're three years and older tend to agree with agree with each other when assigning nice and mean judgments to faces. So what this suggests is it probably doesn't take much social experience at all for us to form these impressions but we actually form them quite early in life and in some of our own research we find that by primary school age children form almost identical impressions of niceness as compared to adults again just emphasizing that it doesn't take a lot of social experience in order to form these sorts of impressions but this certainly isn't to say that social experiences don't have any influence on our impressions and actually in some of our recent research we found that social experiences can influence who we learn to trust and to look at this we recruited identical and non-identical adult twin participants and twins are really cool to recruit because we know that identical twins share the exact same genetic makeup whereas non-identical twins on average share about 50% of the same genes and this is important because it means that any differences between identical and non-identical twins can be attributed to the genetic makeup so we asked twins about their impressions of trust of faces and what we found was that not everyone agreed so if you remember even back to the very first poll today not everyone picked the right face there was about three or four percent of people who chose the other face so there are some small but really meaningful differences in who we think looks trustworthy and what was also interesting was that identical twins didn't form more similar impressions than strangers or the non-identical twins so again this suggests that it's probably our personal environment that is influencing these impressions of trust rather than our genetic makeup so what this what this kind of means is that as we you know go about our daily life and the sorts of social experiences that we have in our daily life these interactions probably influence who we learn to trust so just to take a simple example if I happen to have really positive and trustworthy experiences with a best friend of mine who is blue-eyed I might later attribute all blue-eyed people to be more trustworthy even though that's not necessarily true so I think a really interesting future direction will be to look at well what are the experiences that influence these impressions and other questions that we're looking at in our lab can children update their impressions of trust after seeing how people actually behave and whether gender biases also influence children's impressions so most of the research that I've spoken about today was conducted here at the School of Psychological Science at UWA and it was done with the help of a lot of staff and students from the person perception lab as well as some international collaborators so I'd just like to thank them as well for all of their help and just as a final plug for the university if any of you are really interested by any of the things that I've spoken about today who are interested about studying psychology UWA is a really great program here and it's it would definitely be a great place to study so thank you open to take questions thanks very much for that Gemma guys if you want to start by typing your questions in we've got a few come in already that came in while Gemma was speaking so we've got one here from Diana who thanks you for an interesting talk so far and because she typed this in the middle and she's just wondering if these impressions of children are moderated by the sex of the child yeah so that's a really interesting question so I haven't actually looked to see whether these impressions I guess there hasn't been a really strong study to look at any sex differences in some of my own research I guess we analyzed the data separately for the female and male faces kind of post-hoc just to explore whether there might be differences and we found consistently that these impressions of niceness and shyness they emerge from both female and male faces so it doesn't seem to be that these impressions are different necessarily like we've fallen them from both female and male faces but there might be more subtle differences that we that I guess that analysis wouldn't have been sensitive to and another I guess interesting thing here is that impressions of shyness one cue for how shy someone look can be kind of masculine so generally the more masculine a face the less shy they're perceived or the more feminine the more shy they're perceived so we can see that facial masculinity and potentially facial cues of sex might be interacting a little bit with the impressions but generally speaking these impressions seem important for both faith for both genders cool I've got a question here from Anonymous saying should we rely on our first impressions and if so to what extent cool so as I kind of touched on a little bit I guess the take home message even though we did find there was this you know small kernel of truth in impressions the take home message is that this this isn't or this accuracy I guess is not at a level that we should be trusting in everyday life so although it might be theoretically interesting that there's this you know small kernel of truth from a practical perspective we kind of should be thinking about them in terms of biases that we're having and if anything we should really be trying to tell ourselves not to rely on these impressions we should be doing the opposite cool thanks for that okay I've got a question here from La Chindri I hope I've said that right thank you for the talk and asking would the impressions of niceness and shyness be influenced by facial expressions yeah so that's a really interesting question and in some of our research which I didn't really get to present today but we wanted to find out well what is it in a face that makes someone look more nice or make someone look more shy and one really critical thing is the emotional expression that people are displaying but this doesn't always mean like a really explicit emotional expression sometimes people just have a have a face that looks a little bit naturally smiley or naturally grumpy if you have eyebrows that kind of point downwards so these can be more subtle I guess sensitivities to emotional expression as well but what we found was that yeah indeed having a face that looks a little bit more smiley or even just smiling in general does make you look more nice as a kid and obviously the more angry you look the more naughty you might look so there are there are a few different emotions that can influence these sorts of impressions cool I've got a technical question from Lee that came in while you were speaking she or he is interested to know what the population was that was surveyed about who they would their behaviour towards kids so who they would give awards to or who would lead the class discussion what was the sample you tested that on so we for that study we just tested a sample the sample was from the University of Western Australia and we actually didn't have a very big sample size at all for that study I think we had something like 20 participants so we asked them about their behaviour and these kind of you know made up scenarios and it was quite compelling that even with that relatively you know modest sample size we've got quite a large of the participants were consistently choosing the face that looked you know that matched kind of the description I will say there were reasons for us choosing the sample size we we knew from previous research the sample size didn't need to be massive in order to find the the effect that we were expecting and yeah and in fact it was it was seen pretty consistent across the participants cool I've got a question here now from Bastion saying is there any research on children forming first impressions of other children and how that guides their behaviour and Bastion also sends his greetings from Tilburg what about national attendees awesome thanks for tuning in internationally yeah really interesting question and that's something that we've been interested too so in some of our own research we looked at how kids formed impressions of niceness and shyness from kids faces and I kind of I really quickly went over this data at the end but what we found was that kids impressions were really similar to adults impressions and the correlation was like above 0.9 for impressions of niceness suggesting at least by like a primary school age these impressions of children's impressions of children's faces are quite mature but I totally agree that there actually isn't that much research done looking at kids impressions of other children's faces and I really feel like that's going to be you know an important place for us to start doing some research I guess cool thanks I have a question here from our friend Kay asking noting that you found a correlation between children's actual niceness and how nice they looked but not their actual shyness and how shy they look could there be a parental reporting bias where they don't want to be so honest about how shy their kid is so have you tried asking teachers for example to rate the shyness instead of adults yeah so that would be interesting so we only just for I guess no we haven't done that basically but I think it would be obviously interesting to get some different sort of perspective into how the kids might be behaving I don't know if parents would really be biased to not I'm not sure if I fully believe but as a bias to make your kid not look not I guess behave more shy especially compared to niceness if there was any bias I guess we would probably expect it to be coming from from the questions about niceness but yeah I definitely think that's something interesting and I guess another important thing to think about in terms of shyness is the way that we collected the images was we just asked parents to send in photographs of their own kid so another possibility is that kids don't really act shy around their parents even if they are shy around strangers which is really what shyness is about so maybe it's something more to do with the photographs not capturing the shy tendencies of kids because it's in the context of the parents sending that photo in but yeah I definitely agree it would be interesting to at least see how these different impressions from different sources of behavior at least if we would find a similar pattern of results for teachers I have another question from Diana here saying are there any suggestions on how first impressions of children especially the negative ones could be mitigated sorry could you just say that last bit again so are there any suggestions on how we could mitigate the kind of negative impressions that people might form of a kid's face for example yeah sorry that isn't much research into this at the moment but I guess I think the first step is really just being aware that we're forming these oppressions because a lot of the time we don't really think about how these impressions are biasing our behavior and it happens all the time it happens you know on Airbnb it happens in a workplace so I think if people were first just aware that these biases exist and then the impressions that we form are not at a level of accuracy that we should be relying on every day I think that would be a really important step in kind of producing these biases and unfortunately we know that these biases are kind of sticky so even when we tell people not to look at someone's face to form these impressions or try to encourage them to focus more on the behavior we find that people can't really help but form these impressions from faces so yeah I guess I feel like perhaps the best thing to do is just kind of have that reflective encourage people to be reflective and to think okay did I just judge that person on their face and and I guess try to internalize any biases that we might have cool now I'm just going to pop to one here from anonymous another anonymous because I'm sure this is a burning question for many people how as an individual would you try and modify the first impression for example if you're prone to the commonly known resting bitch face that's a great question so I guess I guess the question comes to what makes someone look trustworthy and how can we make ourselves look more trustworthy and as I kind of mentioned earlier on emotional expressions really influence these impressions so having a bit more of a smiling face can make you look instantly more trustworthy so I guess the good news is they're really cheap and easy way to make yourself look trustworthy is just to smile a bit more or frown a bit less or you know take more photos of you smiling but we also know other things like looking a bit more feminine or a bit more attractive also influence impressions of trust but perhaps those things are a little bit more difficult to modify a couple of people have asked this question but Amy and anonymous have you examined whether racial characteristics influence first impressions in both children and adults yes and I haven't actually looked at how race might interact with these sorts of impressions which I think is a really important obviously in a future direction so in the research that I use I normally restrict it to Caucasian faces just because we know that there are other race effects so what that means is people tend to be poorer at simple things like recognizing other race faces and that might mean that we form different impressions of those faces and of course that's a that's a really interesting question some researchers looked to see whether the same dimensions or the same you know impressions of trust and dominance emerge for different race faces and actually there's a really large-scale international project looking at that at the moment and they find in generally speaking these dimensions look quite consistent although there might be subtle differences there's remarkable consistency in trust and dominance is emerging as quite important impressions but yeah in terms of racial biases and whether stereotypes might be queuing those impressions there's yeah definitely less work has been has been done into that even though it's a really timely topic I think cool we've got another little technical question here Marty's asking how long the faces are typically shown for in your study are they brief presentations or long presentations and does it matter yeah so in our studies we just leave the faces up until participants respond so as long as they want to respond but usually they don't take that long so even in that first demonstration that you did today it didn't take very long for people or for the majority of people to agree other researchers kind of added you know time limitations on to the faces to see how quickly we can actually form these impressions and that research has found that even if you flash the face up for like less than 50 milliseconds people form impressions that are quite consistent with the face that's just left on the screen for an unlimited amount of time so it seems to be that we form these impressions really fast and it doesn't really matter how long the face is up on the screen for cool another question from Marty which is an interesting one so she's asking whether the impressions are controllable so for example if we inform people about these biases tell people in courts judges for example can they then go on to control and reduce the first impression biases to kind of touched on earlier but this is kind of world scenarios now yeah i think that's a really interesting question and i think there is some research that i'm not super on top of into that space but i know that there's been some research but they tell people that you know that these biases exist and not to you know trust the face in in these games that they play and what they find is that even then people can't help but be influenced by the facial first impression although i think it kind of reduces the reliance on it a little bit but it's still it's still there and another interesting finding in some related research is that even when you well we get participants to play a trust game with other players and they get the option to view the face when they're playing that game or not to view the face and you think that most people shouldn't view the face because the face isn't really going to technically speaking it shouldn't tell you anything more accurate about how that person's going to behave in that online trust game but participants really i guess they pay extra money in this game to be able to view the face so it just goes to show you how we really i guess have this instinct that we want to see someone else's face and maybe we maybe we do believe that we can form some sort of accurate impression from those faces so we're just finishing up we've just got time for a last question now i'm actually going to ask one that's come in just at the end because i think it's an interesting one to finish on um this is from mugger yet saying what do you think are some real world implications for the findings of your research for example should job interviews be faceless in order to reduce this bias or should we in fact rely on the biases if they do are giving us a little bit of kernel of truth hey um great question so i guess the most practical advice we could really give people is we shouldn't be i guess we definitely shouldn't be putting photos of ourselves up on things like our cv because we know that even in business context these impressions really influence our decisions so um you know definitely in those sorts of contexts we shouldn't be putting photos of ourselves up but it's kind of it almost goes against the our intuitive because as an employee you want to see a photograph of someone because you probably feel that you can tell something about their personality but what we know from evidence is that the the impression that you form from that photograph on a cv for example um is not really accurate at a level that we should be relying on it so if anything the i guess the practical implications should be that we shouldn't be putting these images in places where we think they could have you know consequences like in the workforce okay well sadly even though we've got heaps more questions we've run out of time so so thanks jemma for a fascinating talk and thanks to everyone for all of your fascinating questions we hope to see some of you back with us next week cheerio