Your face has a profound effect on the people around you. Its expression can prompt assumptions about how kind, mean or trustworthy you are. And for some people, a study finds, it could help determine their fate in court.
Individuals who are deemed to have untrustworthy faces are significantly more likely to be on death row compared with other people convicted of murder, according to astudy published Wednesday in Psychological Science. Inmates thought to have trustworthy faces, however, have a higher chance of receiving the more lenient punishment of life in prison.
"Facial trustworthiness is a significant predictor of the sentence people receive," saysJohn Paul Wilson, who led the study and is a social psychologist at the University of Toronto.
[For more of this story, written by Nadia Whitehead, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...-determine-your-fate]
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