Men’s facial width-to-height ratio predicts aggression: a meta-analysis.
Open accessAbstract
Recent research has identified men's facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) as a reliable predictor of aggressive tendencies and behavior. Other research, however, has failed to replicate the fWHR-aggression relationship and has questioned whether previous findings are robust. In the current paper, we synthesize existing work by conducting a meta-analysis to estimate whether and how fWHR predicts aggression. Our results indicate a small, but significant, positive relationship between men's fWHR and aggression.
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Living adult males with relatively narrower faces tend both to be less reactively aggressive and to be perceived as being less aggressive, to the point of being assessed as having more human-like minds.
“In support of the behavioral significance of recent anatomical changes, living adult males with relatively narrower faces tend both to be less reactively aggressive and to be perceived as being less aggressive (Carré and McCormick, 2008; Haselhuhn et al., 2015), to the point of being assessed as having more human-like minds (Deska et al., 2018).”
From Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication (2019) · cites this paper as Haselhuhn et al., 2015
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- Authors
- Haselhuhn, M. P., Ormiston, M. E., & Wong, E. M.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Riverside (US)
- London Business School (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Haselhuhn, Michael P.
- Venue
- PLoS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2015-04-07
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- e0122637
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4388848
- OpenAlex
- W1977696913
- Cited by
- 166
- References
- 30
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 27 · 2020: 18 · 2019: 15 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 23 · 2016: 11 · 2015: 4
- FWCI
- 2.33
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics › Animal Behavior and Reproduction
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Bullying, Victimization, and Aggression
- Keywords
- facial width-to-height ratio, aggression, facial morphology, men, aggression prediction, replication robustness
- MeSH terms
- Aggression, Body Height, Face, Humans, Male
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