Financial Physiognomy

Here's a new frontier that credit rating agencies might some day explore, should it be within legal bounds: the relationship between facial features and creditworthiness. For decades, the study of physiognomy, or how a person's character might be deduced from his facial features, has been dismissed as quackery, like phrenology and craniology. Nonetheless, The Economist reports in its March 7 issue that some highly respectable academic researchers are giving it a fresh look.

These researchers took a sample of 6,821 loan applicants and recruited an independent panel of 25 observers via the website Mechanical Turk to evaluate each applicant's trustworthiness based solely on photos of their faces. The panel's conclusions had remarkably high rates of correlation with the applicants' credit scores and their actual success in obtaining the loans for which they had applied. The effect persisted even after controlling for factors that might prejudice the panel, such as beauty, race and obesity. The research still has yet to pinpoint exactly what features suggest trustworthiness. Leads me to wonder how your average leprechaun would rate.