Facing Fate: Estimates of Longevity From Facial Appearance and Their Underlying Cues

Life span is associated with a number of physical and social factors, including health, personality, and socioeconomic status. Here, we examined whether life longevity could be predicted from facial appearance. We asked participants to view headshots from a 1923 university yearbook and to estimate how long they thought each person lived, finding that participants’ judgments predicted targets’ actual age of death. Additional participants rated the photos along a variety of characteristics previously found to predict longevity. Judgments of wealth were most closely related to perceived longevity, providing stronger predictive power than perceptions of health, attractiveness, or personality. These results demonstrate that longevity can be accurately judged from faces alone, and that assessments of traits related to actual longevity underlie the accurate perception of life span. S C I E N T I F I C A B S T R A C T Studies on social demographics have demonstrated that life span is influenced by a number of parameters related to one’s physical health and to the external environment. The current study examined whether longevity could be predicted from the face alone and, if so, the characteristics that relate to accurate judgments of longevity. Participants (N 212) viewed 100 portraits from a 1923 university yearbook and were asked to estimate how long each person lived. A structural equation model revealed that estimates of longevity significantly predicted targets’ actual age of death ( .30, t 2.27, p 0.02). To explore the mechanisms underlying these judgments, we examined perceptions of the faces along a set of variables related to actual life span. Perceptions of health and attractiveness ( .21, t 2.77, p .01), power ( .25, t 3.32, p .01) and wealth ( .52, t 6.48, p .01) predicted participants’ judgments of longevity, with perceived wealth showing the strongest relationship to estimated age of death. Overall, these results demonstrate that demographic factors that affect life span may also affect facial appearance, affording accurate judgments of longevity based on the face alone.