It's both obviously true at the most trivial inspection and mentioned multiple times in the article.
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"People tend to draw inferences about personality characteristics, above and beyond what we might assume based on things like gender, ethnicity, or expression. Social attributions from faces alone tend to be constructed from how common facial features are within a culture, cross-cultural norms (e.g., inferences on masculinity/femininity), and idiosyncrasies like resemblance to friends, colleagues, loved ones, and, importantly, ourselves. Olivola's research has shown that these facial attributions people make have serious implications for how people are treated, and their outcomes in life. The especially unfortunate part of these inferences is how heavily they factor into critical decisions, in lieu of actual facts.
"'The fact that social decisions are influenced by facial morphology would be less troubling if it were a strong and reliable indicator of people’s underlying traits,' the researchers write in today's article. 'Unfortunately, careful consideration of the evidence suggests that it is not.'"
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"Olivola has also done studies that show in conservative-leaning states, finding that the more 'traditionally Republican' a person's face is deemed to look, the more votes he/she gets. Even if they're a Democrat. And the correlation between facial competence and vote share is strongest among voters who are lacking in political knowledge."
Cultures and times are based on the people we know.
edit: This is a silly discussion. Find a story in a magazine extolling the appearance of some athlete (for example) that has a photograph or physical description. Then look for the same thing from the 1950s, 1920s, or 1880s. Then look for the same thing in China, then in China in the 1950s. Look at the images of motherhood in advertisements. Look at images of respectability before and after impositions of colonial rule. Appearance-based decisionmaking is almost entirely culturally bound.
Is this the case with specific facial features? Facial features that are considered attractive in various ways seem to remain relatively consistent between times and cultures.
By no means an expert, but AFAIK this isn't the case, except for a few obvious traits: symmetry and an even skin tone. (The hypothesis being that these are traits are that the evolution of our brains/mind has latched onto as obvious signs of genetic fitness.)
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"People tend to draw inferences about personality characteristics, above and beyond what we might assume based on things like gender, ethnicity, or expression. Social attributions from faces alone tend to be constructed from how common facial features are within a culture, cross-cultural norms (e.g., inferences on masculinity/femininity), and idiosyncrasies like resemblance to friends, colleagues, loved ones, and, importantly, ourselves. Olivola's research has shown that these facial attributions people make have serious implications for how people are treated, and their outcomes in life. The especially unfortunate part of these inferences is how heavily they factor into critical decisions, in lieu of actual facts.
"'The fact that social decisions are influenced by facial morphology would be less troubling if it were a strong and reliable indicator of people’s underlying traits,' the researchers write in today's article. 'Unfortunately, careful consideration of the evidence suggests that it is not.'"
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"Olivola has also done studies that show in conservative-leaning states, finding that the more 'traditionally Republican' a person's face is deemed to look, the more votes he/she gets. Even if they're a Democrat. And the correlation between facial competence and vote share is strongest among voters who are lacking in political knowledge."