[2009.03.07]About face欲知心，先知面

Physiognomy and economics

About face欲知心，先知面
Mar 7th 2009
From The Economist print edition

People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks
一个人的信誉好坏似乎可以从面相上看出来

SCIENCE proceeds by trial and error. The successes are trumpeted. The errors are often regarded with embarrassment by subsequent generations, and locked away in attic rooms of the subject’s mansion like mad relatives in a Victorian novel. Usually, they stay there. Craniology, phrenology and eugenics, once-respectable fields of endeavour that are now regarded with a shudder, may shriek from time to time, but few sane people pay attention to them. One, however, has escaped recently, and is trying to rehabilitate itself. For years physiognomy—the idea that a person’s face is a reflection of his character—was sneered at. Now, it is making a come back.

科学是在不断的探索中前进的。成功会被大力宣传，错误往往被接下的几代人视为难堪的事，会被锁在科学领域宏伟大厦的阁楼里，就如同维多利亚时代小说中的疯癫的亲戚（被锁在阁楼里）一样。错误通常（就是这样）呆在那里。颅骨学，骨像学，优生学这些学科曾经受人尊重、人类也为之付出过努力。对这些学科现在人们说起来会不寒而栗。这些学科也时不时地昙花一现，但很少有神志清醒的人会关注它们。但有门学科却是个例外，最近正试图获得新生。很多年来，人们对宣扬人的面部是其性格的反映的相面术嗤之以鼻。现在，它卷土重来了。

Appearances certainly count. Women, for instance, judge men by their faces. Testosterone levels are reflected in the face, and who is seen as a one-night stand and who as a potential husband depends in part on this physical feature. Similarly, a male face betrays the owner’s underlying aggressiveness and even his business acumen. Facial beauty in either sex is also associated with higher incomes. The latest research, though, cuts to the moral quick. For Jefferson Duarte of Rice University in Houston, Texas, and his colleagues are suggesting that one of a person’s most telling moral features, his creditworthiness, can also be seen in his face.

外表自然很重要，比如说，女人以相貌评判男人。睾丸激素多寡可以从脸上看出，谁看起来是做一夜情的情人，谁看起来是将来的老公，部分取决于身体的特征。与之类似的，一个男性的脸上可能会流露出其隐藏着咄咄逼人的个性，甚至能看到其精明的生意头脑。无论男女，俊俏的面容也和高收入有联系。不单这样，最新的研究成果把（人的外表）和人的品性联系起来。德克萨斯州休斯顿莱丝大学的杰弗逊杜阿特和他的同事们指出：一个人最为显著的品性特征之一的信誉，可以从其脸上看出来。

Dr Duarte’s research was enabled by the internet. Once, if you wanted to borrow money, you had either to visit a bank or to tap a rich friend or relative. Now it is possible to do business directly with a stranger, using a peer-to-peer lending site. The needy advertise themselves, and how much they want. Those flush with cash assess potential borrowers and decide who to lend to, and at what rate of interest.

是互联网让杜阿特先生的研究成为可能。在过去，如果你想借钱，你要么去银行，要么去找有钱的朋友或亲戚。现在通过使用p2p借贷网站就可以直接和陌生人做生意了。要借钱的人会自我宣传一番，说出自己需要的金额。那些资金充足的人评估（这些）潜在的借款人，然后决定借给谁，利率多少。

The borrowers themselves have to disclose their financial positions, credit histories, jobs and education. Often, though this is not required, they also post photographs of themselves. That means it might be possible to assess the effects of appearance on the outcome. And the process is an open auction, which means that all offers, acceptances and rejections are in the public domain.

借款人必须透露其财务状况，信用历史，工作和受教育程度。通常，即使没有人要求，借款人也会附上自己的照片。这就意味着评估（人的）外表对（借贷交易的）结果的影响是可能的。而且这个过程是个公开的竞拍，所有的提议、接受和拒绝都是在公共场合进行的。

For his research, Dr Duarte chose a site called Prosper.com. His intention was twofold: to see if physiognomy-based prejudices about creditworthiness existed and, if they did, whether they were justified. To do so he used another peer-to-peer website to subcontract the job of assessing creditworthiness to a number of ordinary people. The site in question (which is run by Amazon) is called Mechanical Turk. In this case the people it matches are those who have a task that needs doing, and those willing to perform it.

为了他的研究，杜阿特选择了一个叫Prosper.com的网站，他有两重目的：一、看看基于相面术的对信誉的偏见是否存在，二、如果确实存在，又是否公正。为了这个，他又利用另一个p2p网站，把信誉评价的工作分包给一些普通人。他所选的这个网站（由亚马孙公司运作）叫“机械的土耳其人”。这个网站要为那些有（信誉评价）需要的人和那些愿意去执行任务的人们牵线搭桥。

Peer review大众审查
The team recruited 25 Mechanical Turk workers and asked them to assess pictures of potential borrowers that had been posted on Prosper.com. In particular, they were asked to rate, on a scale of one to five, how trustworthy these people looked, and to estimate the percentage probability that each individual would repay a $100 loan. They were also asked to make several other assessments, such as the individual’s sex, race, age, attractiveness and obesity. The 25 results for each photograph were then averaged and analysed.

研究小组招募了二十五个“机械土耳其人”网站的工作人员，要求他们评估贴在Prosper.com上潜在借款人的照片。具体地说，工作人员被要求按从一到五级的打分标准，给这些借款人打印象分，并评估每个人会偿还100美元贷款的概率。他们还被要求做其他的评估，例如借款人的性别、种族、年龄、吸引力和肥胖程度。研究人员对每张照片产生的25种结果加以平均并进行分析分析。

The researchers looked at 6,821 loan applications, 733 of which were successful. Their first finding was that the assessments of trustworthiness, and of likelihood to repay a loan, that were made by Mechanical Turk workers did indeed correlate with potential borrowers’ credit ratings based on their credit history. That continued to be so when the other variables, from beauty to race to obesity, were controlled for statistically. Shifty physiognomy, it seems, is independent of these things.

研究人员看到了6821例贷款申请，其中733例申请成功。研究人员的第一个发现表明“机械土耳其人”的工作人员对可信度及偿还贷款可能性的评估确实与根据潜在借款人的信贷档案给出的信贷评分结果一致。对其他的变量，从容貌到种族再到肥胖程度，经过统计对比分析后，结果依然如此。似乎狡诈的面相独立于这些因素。

That shiftiness was also recognised by those whose money was actually at stake. People flagged as untrustworthy by the Mechanical Turks were less likely than others to be offered a loan at all. To have the same chance of getting one as those deemed most trustworthy they were required to pay an interest rate that was, on average, 1.82 percentage points higher, even when the effects of historical creditworthiness were statistically eliminated.

那些资金处于危险中的借款人也能够认识到这种奸诈。被“机械土耳其人”认为不可靠的人比其他人得到贷款的几率要低。即使在统计分析角度把这些人的（不良）历史信贷记录排除，这些不可靠的人要想得到和那些被认为最值得信赖的人相同的贷款几率，他们也要要支付平均高出1.82百分点的利率。

For trustworthiness, then, physiognomy works. Unfortunately, Dr Duarte’s method was not designed to find out which features label someone as trustworthy. But credit-rating agencies are no doubt working on that question even now.

面相确实会影响人的可信度。遗憾的是，杜阿莱特所用的方法没有试图去确认具体是哪些面部特征标明人的可信度。毫无疑问，信贷评估机构现在还在研究这个问题。

 

译者：GeorgeJiang  http://www.ecocn.org/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=17691&extra=page%3D1