I suppose most people have seen one of the online posts about “What face (or insert any other body parts like hand or teeth - see above) shape reveals about your personality”. Most psychologists will immediately think about the dark times when phrenology was considered a science. Phrenology has long been debunked as pseudoscience and that is a good thing. However, ideas about morphology (shape of body parts) and personality or temperament date back at least three thousand years, e.g. in Indian Ayurveda or Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and were until recently proposed by - otherwise respectable - scientists like William Sheldon. Are those ideas all just cases of unicorns - seeing patterns where there are none - or could there be some truth in them?
I have proposed one evolutionary scenario that could explain a correlation between morphology and psychology: our ancestral subsistence strategies: hunting, gathering, farming and herding. I have never seen systematic anthropological research comparing say the teeth of foragers, farmers and herders. However, there is research regarding the changes in the transition from foraging to farming. Hunter-gatherers had longer, narrower jaws while the farmers had shorter, wider jaws, for example. In the above example ancient farmers would most closely correspond to the phlegmatic type with less dominant central (softer food) and a rather conformist personality (I wouldn’t agree with all the traits as I am a melancholic who isn’t very organised). Rectangular teeth with more dominant centrals would likely correspond to hunter types. Hunters aren’t choleric people (on the contrary), but would become so if people started to command them as hunter-gatherers are completely self-directed without a command hierarchy.
In any case, subsistence strategies practised over a few thousand years should lead to slightly different adaptations in various morphological traits, e.g. feet (locomotion), teeth (different foods) and hand shape (e.g. different requirements for grip). In 2021 researchers found that brain shape and face shape are linked via genes:
An interdisciplinary team led by KU Leuven and Stanford has identified 76 overlapping genetic locations that shape both our face and our brain. What the researchers didn’t find is evidence that this genetic overlap also predicts someone’s behavioural-cognitive traits or risk of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. This means that the findings help to debunk several persistent pseudoscientific claims about what our face reveals about us.
I wouldn’t go so far to claim that the researchers’ negative findings regarding behavioural traits automatically debunk morpho-psychology. In August 2022 newspapers all over the world reported about a strange scientific finding: a team of researcher genetically tested doppelgangers from all over the world and found that they did not only share their physical traits but also similar genotypes:
Herein, we have characterized in detail a set of “look-alike” humans, defined by facial recognition algorithms, for their multiomics landscape. We report that these individuals share similar genotypes and differ in their DNA methylation and microbiome landscape. These results not only provide insights about the genetics that determine our face but also might have implications for the establishment of other human anthropometric properties and even personality characteristics.
Not only were the researchers confident that there is a correlation between physical and behavioural traits, but that this kind of research may be potentially useful, say, in forensics where the facial features of a perpetrator might one day be reconstructed based on the DNA found by investigators:
Overall, we provided a unique insight into the molecular characteristics that potentially influence the construction of the human face. We suggest that these same determinants correlate with both physical and behavioral attributes that constitute human beings. These findings provide a molecular basis for future applications in various fields such as biomedicine, evolution, and forensics. Through collaborative efforts, the ultimate challenge would be to predict the human face structure based on the individual’s multiomics landscape.
Apart from genetics I also have high hopes that AI will be able to detect personality traits one day. The MidJourney AI software creates drawings of characters based on MBTI. Here is a rendition of an INFP, and an INFP actor next to it.
For more check out my book: Evolutionary Symmetry - Face and Body Typing : What our bodies reveal about our temperaments and evolutionary past
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B095N96FG2
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