Americans shown a single photograph of a man’s face from a hunter-gatherer society could tell, better than chance, how good a hunter he was. The same trick failed for women: Americans’ guesses about women’s gathering skill ran in the opposite direction to reality.
The study was carried out by Adar B. Eisenbruch of Purchase College, Kristopher M. Smith, Clifford I. Workman, Christopher von Rueden of the University of Richmond and Coren L. Apicella of the University of Pennsylvania. It was published online on June 29, 2024, in Evolution and Human Behavior, in the journal’s July 2024 issue.
Faces from two foraging societies
Earlier research showed that Americans readily judge people’s hunting and gathering ability from their faces, but nobody knew whether those snap judgments were right. The team used three datasets from two traditional subsistence societies, the Hadza and the Tsimane. In each, people had been photographed and rated by their own peers on how well they hunt or gather, 175 individuals in all.
They then showed the photos to 579 American adults recruited on Amazon’s MTurk platform, who rated each face for foraging ability without any other information.
Right about men, wrong about women
For men, the Americans’ ratings consistently lined up with the peer evaluations of hunting ability, with an overall correlation of 0.25. That is a modest link, but it held across the datasets, suggesting that something in a man’s face carries real information about his productivity as a hunter.
For women, the result flipped. The American raters’ impressions of women’s productivity were inversely correlated with how their own communities rated their gathering ability. The authors write that trait inferences from faces are “pervasive, but sometimes misleading,” and this study found both sides of that within one experiment.
Study Details:
- Title: US adults accurately assess Hadza and Tsimane men’s hunting ability from a single face photograph
- Authors: Adar B. Eisenbruch, Kristopher M. Smith, Clifford I. Workman, Christopher von Rueden, Coren L. Apicella
- Journal: Evolution and Human Behavior, 45(4)
- Publication Date: June 29, 2024
- DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2024.106598