I think this is a very dangerous line of study. I can easily see these results getting used to forward racism and other appearance based discrimination.
> Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.
Truth doesn't really care about your sensibilities. It seems there is actually an art to finding the mind's construction in the face!
What this is really telling us is that we should not be judging others on their political, sexual, ideological, whatever-ical affiliations. A person is a person and we should value them for that and only that. These other qualities may be more or less useful in some sense, but not in the sense that counts - that they are a thinking feeling person who deserves our respect.
A lot has changed, including nutrition. I would not be surprised if 17th century skeletons and body builds were observably different from the contemporary ones. In fact, at least height and weight of an average person is fairly different compared to the past.
And those are all non-genetic factors along the lines of other non-controversial things like "how wealthy you are will influence your political views," versus things supporting the "all political views are sacrosanct and can't be judged, because people can't help themselves" direction that 'plutonorm was suggesting.
No, what would change is that you'd get people from hundreds of years ago expressing conservatism or liberalism _for the time_. It's neither fashion nor facial structure, it's more or less intensity of facial scrunch vs. innocence, or wariness vs invitation. This is going to hold true for all humans and indeed for similar enough animals so long as they have the ability for comparable postures and expressions (dogs and cats would have the capacity for posture but I think dogs are more capable of brow expression/mobility, and of course monkeys and apes are close parallels to human expression)
So you could, in a limited sense, tell whether you've got a hippie cat or one who wants the hippies to get off its litterbox :) the latter will give you more side-eye, and more of a narrowed gaze.
I honestly don't see the danger here. This is an incremental addition to an already very large body of research that's existed for a while.
And racism isn't rational. You can't combat racism by suppressing research. If a study came out demonstrating that Alpha Race is smarter than Beta Race, and that Beta Races is smarter than Gamma Race. The racist Betas might use that study to justify their hate for Gammas, but they'd find an entire different reason to hate Alphas.
I really hope not. 72% is impressive. But, when you're thinking of making any real world decisions based on it, 72% shouldn't really be considered much better than chance.
You shouldn't make any decisions on it, but it's striking that it works at all. It would be interesting to know why.
I have my suspicions about that, which are that people tend to mimic those they see around them. Which could well extend to how they hold their faces unconsciously. It would be not unlike the way we develop similar accents to those around us, just with different muscles. But that's a hypothesis that would have to be tested.
Sadly, if it holds up, it almost certainly would lead to people making real world decisions.
I think people are already making those real world decisions, with or without being able to automate the process. The real implication here is that political ideology owes more to raw emotional biases than it does to analysis and introspection. It echoes a person's general attitude toward life in the absence of specifics. I would say this is not a revolutionary observation, but it's a confirmation through experimental means.
- Steve Pinker