IFLScience: Here’s How People Judge You Based On Your Face

Scientists have identified countless ways that we judge people based on their looks, even when those judgments have no basis in reality.

"We form these immediate impressions of people — we just can’t help it," Alexander Todorov, a psychology professor at Princeton University, told Business Insider.

Todorov’s lab tests responses to computer-generated faces to model traits associated with perceived attractiveness, trustworthiness, competence, and more.

Todorov warns that these impressions are highly inaccurate. People have many biases, including halo effects — where we assume one positive trait will be followed by others — and stereotypes — where we associate behaviors with looks. Still, the professor says it’s worth understanding them, if only to fight them.

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The Daily Beast: Has It Really ‘Gotten Better’ for Gay Kids?

In 2005, when GLSEN conducted its first “From Teasing to Torment” national survey, nearly 62 percent of U.S. middle and high schoolers reported that students at their schools were victimized based on sexual orientation. In 2015, when GLSEN collected data for this follow up report a decade later, that figure was still just shy of 50 percent.

Other decreases in anti-LGBT bullying were similarly gradual. From 2005 to 2015, the percentage of students who reported witnessing victimization based on gender expression fell from 60 to 49 percent, and the percentage who reported hearing the word “gay” used in a derogatory fashion dipped slightly from 89 percent to 75 percent.

Even more disturbing is the fact that race-based victimization remained flat, with nearly 38 percent of students reporting it 10 years apart. [...]

Fifteen percent of the students even said teachers and administrators were making homophobic comments. Nearly 13 percent reported hearing “negative remarks about transgender people” from school staff. And less than 20 percent said staff intervened “often” when they heard negative remarks about gender expression, which is especially concerning given that nearly a quarter of the students did not identify in a strictly gender-conforming way. [...]

“What our research shows is that [bullying] doesn’t toughen you up and get you ready for the ‘real world,’” said Villenas. “It actually leads to poor psychological outcomes. It leads to lower educational aspirations. It leads to more likely experiences with school discipline and higher absenteeism. We see no evidence here that it prepares students for the ‘real world’ or for college. Quite the opposite, actually.”

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The Jerusalem Post: Palestinians left wondering as Saudi paper takes Netanyahu’s side

The editorial, published Sunday in the Saudi Gazette, a daily published in Jeddah that has a woman editor-in-chief, seemed to depart in tone from the widely-held position in the Arab world that Israel is responsible for the impasse with the Palestinians. It likened Netanyahu’s proposal that the two leaders address each other’s parliaments, to Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s 1977 invitation to Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to visit Israel, and implied it could also lead to a breakthrough. Begin made the invitation “and the rest is history,’’ the editorial said. [...]

The editorial comes two months after a Saudi delegation of academics and businessmen, led by retired Saudi general Anwar Eshki, touched off criticism in the Arab world for openly visiting Israel and meeting with officials and MKs. There was speculation that the trip reflected a quiet development of discrete ties between the countries based largely on their having a common enemy, Iran.

Palestinians are wary that any normalization with Israel by Saudi Arabia or other Arab countries would represent a sellout of their cause and undermine their position vis-à-vis Israel.

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Vox: The head of Hezbollah has found someone he hates even more than Israelis

In other words, things have gotten so bad that Hezbollah, Israel’s mortal enemy, now considers Wahhabis — that is, fellow Muslims — to be worse than Israel. Bear in mind, this is coming from the same man who has described Israel as “a cancerous entity and the root of all the crises and wars” and pledged that Israel’s destiny “is manifested in our motto: 'Death to Israel.’” [...]

But despite how it may seem, Nasrallah’s statement is not, at its base, a conflict about religion. Though there are certainly strong religious disagreements between Sunni and Shia — and especially between extreme fundamentalist Sunnis and extreme fundamentalist Shia — the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia has little to do with dogma. It’s actually about something far less exotic: power and influence. [...]

This proxy war plays out in conflicts all over the Middle East. For instance, Saudi Arabia, with US military assistance, is engaged in a brutal air war against Iranian-backed Houthi fighters inside Yemen that has sparked a massive humanitarian crisis in the impoverished country. The United Nations recently estimated that at least 10,000 civilians have died, and acknowledged that that number was almost certainly lower than the actual toll.

Saudi Arabia’s proxy fight with Iran is also helping to fuel the bloodshed in Syria, where an estimated 400,000 people have been killed over the past five years while millions more have fled the country and sparked the biggest refugee crisis in decades.

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Quartz: There’s no such thing as a protest vote

But it doesn’t matter what message you think you are sending, because no one will receive it. No one is listening. The system is set up so that every choice other than “Republican” or “Democrat” boils down to “I defer to the judgement of my fellow citizens.” It’s easy to argue that our system shouldn’t work like that. It’s impossible to argue it doesn’t work like that.

This is frustrating, of course, but that’s how our presidential elections are set up. Democracies alternate the coalition in power, but different systems do so in different ways. In multi-party systems, voters get the satisfaction of voting for smaller, ideologically purer factions—environmental parties, anti-immigrant parties, and so on. The impure compromises come when those factions are forced to form coalitions large enough to govern. The inevitable tradeoffs are part of the governing process, not the electoral process. [...]

Boycotts can work in countries where voting is mandatory, because not voting can be an act of civil disobedience. In the United States, however, voting is not and has never been required. (Our elites have always preferred minimal participation, and laziness is a cheaper tool than suppression.) In presidential elections, non-voters always outnumber voters who choose the winning candidate. With that much passive non-participation, active non-participation gets lost. [...]

It’s clear why third-party candidates want votes, but it’s not clear why voters would want third parties. The Green Party, for example, hasn’t elected so much as a member of Congress, much less fielded a credible presidential candidate, and their organization does no actual environmental work. Greenpeace helps the environment more in any given week than the Green Party has in its entire existence—a problem common to third parties generally. If you’re a Libertarian, you’re better off donating to Cato than voting for Gary Johnson. If you’re a paleoconservative, you’re better off donating to the Rockford Institute than voting for Darrell Castle.

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