FACING THE TRUTH: A LETTER TO THE ECONOMIST (July 10, 2011)

Several years ago you reported that Justin Carré and Cheryl McCormick of Brock University in Ontario, Canada, had shown that aggressiveness could be predicted from the ratio between the width of a person’s face and its height: those with wide faces are more aggressive than those with long ones (“Facing the Truth,” August 23, 2008). Now you report that Michael Haselhuhn and Elaine Wong of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee have corroborated this result, albeit only for men, but that they have also shown that those with wide faces are more likely to lie or cheat (“Facing the Truth,” July 9, 2011). I look forward to yet another article along these lines a few years from now showing that those with wide faces are better in business than those with long ones. Even though physiognomy is an unfashionable science at this juncture, as you dutifully mention, this result would be of special interest to the readers of your mighty newspaper. And I can already predict the article’s title: “Facing the Truth.”