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Comment by sdwr | Hacker News Reader

I love the direction, drilling down into conversation mechanics. Very cool that technology is enabling this kind of deep dive. It's a very conservative article tho, not making any big points.

I'd like to see a stab at a theory that explains how conversation actually works. Intuitively, it feels like a hack built on top of systems designed for acting in the world.

I think social position is written on the face. The labiofacial folds measure exclusion (deep lines indicate social isolation/discomfort, no crease indicates strong social ties). Feels tied in with nervous laughter as well.

Eye openness

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First year phrenology student?

Seriously, though. As I get older, I am starting to think there might actually be a strong correlation between how people look and act. What I don't know for sure is which is first. Some is obviously nature bur nurture is obviously a thing, too.

> I am starting to think there might actually be a strong correlation between how people look and act.

I think the way people act influences the way their appearance is perceived in very subtle ways. A sketchy liar could have exactly the same bone structure as an honest man, but the sketchy liar will be perceived as less honest due to almost imperceptible differences in body language, the way they hold their facial muscles, etc. The result of these subtle differences can be detected with a vague sensation of "this guy is sketchy, he's probably about to lie to me."

Also I think there is an element of truth to the old wive's tail of "your face is going to get stuck like that". People who frequently have malicious facial expressions in private will find themselves having malicious facial expressions when they don't mean to, when interacting with the people they intend to deceive. Maybe out of pure habit, or maybe because those muscles are just getting more exercise. Somebody who often has a lopsided smirk will develop muscles on one side of their face more than the other, and eventually they can't help but to smirk by default.

The stereotype of nerds looking a certain way probably has a slight basis in truth.

I've heard wearing eyeglasses is correlated to intelligence (though I assume weakly).

The brain is a physical structure. So is it inconceivable that some genes may code for phenotypes in both the brain and external appearance, or have some indirect purely biological relationship? I’m not suggesting that this would account for a significant portion of the correlation between external appearance and behavior (if any at all), but maybe it’s enough to be picked up subconsciously.

Domestication syndrome seems to suggest a link. [1]

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_syndrome

If one assumes behavior is largely driven by physical/chemical/electrical processes within our bodies then this would not be surprising. Those processes are going to affect our appearances and being able to roughly assess those processes in somebody else from a distance would be a top tier skill that evolution would certainly end up selecting for.

A largely related example of this is smell [1]. I'm not referencing that particular study so much as the million other studies it also references and mentions early on. Our conscious appreciation of smell doesn't really reach much greater depth than "eww" or "aww", but there's a dramatically larger amount of subconscious processing that we do to come to that conclusion. For one fun example, men subconsciously rate the perceived attractiveness of a woman, based on a blind shirt sniff test, significantly higher when she is ovulating. Again, it's evolution baby. [2]

As a random thought, this also goes some way to explaining the uncanny valley. When the pieces don't fit together into a coherent whole, the brain simply rejects the lot of it.

[1] - https://cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/1...

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDaOgu2CQtI

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