If it takes less than a second to judge a politician based on their face, what does that say about the presumption of innocence? Neuroscientist Alexander Todorov tells us about the power of first impressions.
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DW: Your book "Face Value" describes how we make snap judgments about people based on their faces, and that we do that in seconds or less. Personally, I find faces leave a stronger impression on me than names.
Alexander Todorov: Absolutely.
Why is that?
Faces are really special, socially speaking. There are lots of fascinating studies with newborns who have virtually no visual experience. For instance, if you show them a face-like stimuli and something else with equal complexity, they prefer to look at the face. So there's a good case to be made that in a sense we're born with this readiness to look at faces. And then in the first few months of life you have a massive exposure to faces. There are studies where you put tiny spy cameras on the baby's head, and you record what they see, and 25 percent of the time they're looking at faces, which makes sense because they're just being carried around. But eventually this develops … and there are other studies that suggest we have regions in the brain dedicated exclusively to processing the face, and it seems they come on line pretty early in human development. So they are really important stimuli.
Alexander Todorov - author of "Face Value" - on the dangers of first impressions
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And we're using these stimuli to make judgment calls - you say, for instance, we judge a person's competence or character based on their face. And that can be positive and negative. Take the 2001 terrorism events in the US. Very quickly, Osama bin Laden became this image of hate or evil. We focused everything on his face. And that happens time and again. What's happening there?
We started talking about it being easier to remember faces than names. But it's actually the best mnemonic technique. When you try to remember something you associate it with something visual. A face is such that once you're familiar with it you never forget it. And it's very easy to tack different memories to it. Then once you have this knowledge, all of that knowledge is projected onto a particular image. So a face triggers all kinds of associations and feelings.
Who looks more competent? The left face was created by morphing faces of politicians seen as more competent than their rivals; the right face is a morphing of the rivalsImage: Alexander Todorov
You also describe how experiments have shown we need hardly any time to make a judgment call. And I wonder whether, when you get down to microseconds, where the face is barely visible to the person seeing it, are we imagining a face that we want to see there - a face we like or fear - are we creating an image from all the faces we already know?
I don't think so. If that was the case, then presumably you wouldn't get any agreement between the participants [in the lab]. The first thing we do is look for agreements between participants.
You can manipulate the amount of time they see a face systematically from 33 milliseconds to an unlimited amount of time. Thirty-three milliseconds is at the threshold of your visual awareness, so you are seeing a face, but you're not going to be able to articulate what you're seeing. And some people say that's ridiculous. But even after this small exposure your judgment correlates with judgments made in the absence of any time constraints - unlimited time. This correlation increases but it reaches a plateau at about 167 milliseconds. So you really don't need more than 200 milliseconds [to form a judgment]. It's literally a single glance impression.
Avoiding visual stereotypes is hard - there are "pictures in our heads." Look at these faces and ask yourself which looks more criminal and which is more non-criminalImage: Alexander Todorov
Say we judge competence in a politician based on a single glance at his or her face, what else can you tell us about the role that prior knowledge of the person plays?
Knowledge is very powerful. And once you have the knowledge you see the image differently.
We did a bunch of experiments with faces of bald men - actually it turns out there were a few women too. And for many years in the lab we believed these were faces of prisoners. They were neutral images, black and white, shaved guys, looking stern. And then I decided to get hold of the original source. It was an art book called "Heads," and the artist simply took pictures of people from all walks of life, but certainly not prisoners, who were bald. That's it. One of the pictures was particularly stern. It was of a former police officer from Westchester County in New York State, and that seemed plausible, but there was nothing in the image to suggest it was true.
The media landscape is getting more and more visual, influenced by social media. Traditional TV is out the window, we're told, but we're still focused on video and photographic images. So I suppose the power of faces and other visuals will only grow as more people start to understand how you can influence perceptions of competence, what's believable, who's a criminal, who's trustworthy, who can get a loan…
It's standard practice to retouch photos in the media to create whatever look, perception, or mood is desiredImage: Colourbox
In the newspaper industry, editors always pick the image that fits the story. There's the example of Jared Lee Loughner, the guy who shot an Arizona senator. When that happened, I was living in New York, and the next day in every major newspaper and tabloid … it was like the "eyes of evil" … they strategically selected this image to fit the story. "The Guardian" was the only newspaper that ran a completely different image, where Loughner looks normal, on a college campus, smiling.
So images have a huge effect, but the knowledge also colors you so much. And once you have the knowledge, you try to find the image that fits your story.
Alexander Todorov is professor of psychology at Princeton University, where he is also affiliated with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His book "Face Value: The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions" is published by Princeton University Press (2017).
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Japan's revered war criminals
The souls of 14 convicted war criminals are worshiped as martyrs in Japan's Yasukuni Shrine. DW takes a look at the perpetrators and what they were accused of.
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Hideki Tojo
Hideki Tojo was Japan's prime minister from 1941 to 1944 and Chief of Staff of the Japanese Imperial Army. He was accused of being responsible for the killing of 4 million Chinese as well as conducting biological experiments on prisoners of war. Following his country's surrender in 1945 he tried to kill himself with a pistol. However, he survived, confessed to the crimes and was hanged in 1948.
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Kenji Doihara
The "China expert" began his career in 1912 as a secret agent in Beijing. Doihara, who spoke Mandarin and several Chinese dialects fluently, founded the "Manchurian Empire" together with China's last emperor, Puyi. It was a puppet regime under Japanese control. In 1940, Doihara backed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He was hanged eight years later.
Image: Gemeinfrei/Unbekannt
Iwane Matsui
Matsui was accused of being involved in the 1937 Nanjing massacre in which an estimated 300,000 people were killed within a week. Nowadays, historians believe that the decision for the carnage was taken by the imperial family. The family, however, was never charged. A tribunal convicted Matsui of being a "Class B" war criminal. He was executed in 1948.
Image: Gemeinfrei
Heitaro Kimura
In 1939, Kimura waged a brutal war against the armed forces of China's Communist Party in the eastern part of the country. He set up concentration camps in which thousands died. In 1944, he was sent to Burma where he became army commander. He used prisoners of war to build a 415-kilometer-long railway connecting Thailand to Burma. Some 13,000 allied soldiers died. He was hanged in 1948.
Image: Gemeinfrei
Koki Hirota
Hirota was Japan's prime minister until February 1937 and later became foreign minister. He was charged with sanctioning the Nanjing massacre. Hirota (seen here in the middle) was the only civilian politician to be hanged in 1948.
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Seishiro Itagaki
On September 18, 1931, Itagaki orchestrated a bomb attack on a railway in the northeastern region of Manchuria. Japan used this as a pretext to declare war on China. Itagaki later fought in North Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia until he surrendered in 1945. He was found guilty of escalating the war and was hanged in 1948.
Image: Gemeinfrei
Akira Muto
Ever since the outbreak of the war, Muto fought in China and was later found guilty of taking part in several atrocities, including the Nanjing massacre. According to the judges, Muto not only let prisoners of war starve but also "tortured and murdered" them.
Image: Gemeinfrei
Yosuke Matsuoka
Under his leadership, Japan left the League of Nations after some member states accused Japan of starting the war against China. Matsuoka was foreign minister between 1940 and 1941 and was one of the co-signers of the Tripartite Pact between Japan, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In 1946, he died of tuberculosis before being sentenced.
Image: Gemeinfrei/Japanese book Ningen Matsuoka no Zenbo
Osami Nagano
Marshal Admiral Osami Nagano, a supporter of the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, ordered the attack on December 7, 1941. Twelve US warships either sunk or were badly damaged and more than 2,400 American soldiers were killed. Nagano died of pneumonia in 1946 before he could be tried in the Tokyo war crimes trials.
Image: Gemeinfrei
Toshio Shiratori
He was the head of Japanese propaganda. Shiratori was Japan's ambassador to Italy and pushed for an alliance between his country, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. As an advisor to the foreign minister, he disseminated his fascist ideals both "on and off the stage." Toshio was sentenced to life in prison where he died in 1949.
Image: Gemeinfrei
Kiichiro Hiranuma
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Kuniaki Koiso
Koiso was Japan's prime minister between July 1944 and April 1945, and served in China and North Korea. He was sentenced to life in prison although the tribunal was of the view he didn't take direct part in the atrocities committed by the military. The judges, however, ruled that he had been in a position to put a stop to them. Koiso died of cancer in 1950 while serving his jail sentence.
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Yoshijiro Umezu
From 1939 to 1945, Umezu was in command of the 700,000-strong Guandong Army based in northeastern China. Although he opposed a Japanese surrender shortly before the end of the war, Umezu (seen here in uniform in the first row) was ordered by the emperor to sign the document of unconditional surrender on September 2, 1945. He was sentenced to life in prison and died in jail in 1949.
Image: AP
Shigenori Togo
Togo was an expert on Germany. He spoke German, studied German philology, married a German and was appointed Japan's ambassador to Germany in 1937. He was appointed foreign minister in 1941 and again in 1945, when he advised the Japanese government to surrender. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison and died in 1950 while in jail.
