Report Photo selection study reveals we don't look like we think we look

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Be careful when choosing your next passport photo or profile image as a new study suggests we are so poor a picking good likenesses of our face that strangers make better selections.

This is one of the findings of a study by Dr David White and colleagues from the UNSW Australia published today, Wednesday 24 June 2015, in the British Journal of Psychology. The study was supported by an Australian Research Council grants and funding from the Australian Passport Office.

Dr White said: “In face-to-face encounters with unfamiliar people, it is often necessary to verify that we are who we claim to be. For example, we are asked to prove our identity when processing financial transactions and crossing borders. In these and many other commonplace situations, photo-ID is the most common method for identity verification. However, despite the clear importance of this visual task previous research has shown that we are quite poor when matching photos of unfamiliar faces.”

In the study an initial group of over 130 undergraduate students downloaded 10 suitable photos of themselves from Facebook and ranked them in order of the best to worst likeness. These participants took part in a minute long web cam video of their face and two still photos were also taken (one smiling, one neutral).

Sixteen participants who did not know the students watched the webcam videos and afterwards ranked the Facebook photos in order of resemblance to the person they had seen in the video. A further 73 participants were then recruited to complete an online face matching test.


Read more here. (Science Daily)
 
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