Who are you calling a wide-boy?

THESE days, physiognomy is an unfashionable science. The idea that character is etched into an individual's face is so much at variance with modern notions of free will that research in the area dwindled long ago. But it is making a tentative comeback. Two recent studies of faces suggest that their features do matter, biologically speaking: they can predict dishonesty and they can provoke orgasm.

The study on dishonesty was done by Michael Haselhuhn and Elaine Wong of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Dr Haselhuhn and Dr Wong wondered if a feature already known to reflect aggressiveness in men (but not women) might also predict a tendency to lie and cheat. That feature is the ratio of a face's width to its length. The wider a man's face, the more likely he will hit you.

Honest signals of aggressiveness make sense. Potential victims avoid starting fights they cannot win, while the aggressive get their way without risking injury. It does not, however, obviously make sense to give away in advance of a negotiation that you are likely to lie or cheat in it. Yet Dr Haselhuhn and Dr Wong found this was the case. In both a staged negotiation using MBA students and a separate experiment in which ordinary undergraduates were given an opportunity to earn more money if they misreported the results of a series of die rolls, the two researchers found that the wider a man's face was, compared with its height, the more likely he was to lie about his intentions (in the case of the negotiations) or cheat (in the case of the die rolls). That did not, however, apply to women.

The probable explanation is that the advantage of being seen, reliably, as aggressive outweighs the disadvantage of being, predictably, a cheat and a liar. Also, the fear of retaliation provoked by aggressiveness means victims of cheating and lying might not want to push the point anyway, and might thus be willing to concede a certain amount of slippage in their negotiating position, knowing full well what is going on. Since women rarely use violence to get their way, they do not evolve such signals.

The likelihood of a link between men's faces and women's orgasms is more obvious than that between faces and cheating, but is nevertheless significant. In a study to be published in Evolution and Human Behavior, David Puts and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University found what you might expect—that sex with a good-looking man is more likely to result in orgasm than sex with a minger. What this means is that good-looking men are even more likely to conceive children than was previously believed. Obviously, the handsome have more mating opportunities than the ugly. But if they more often bring a woman to orgasm, as well, each of those opportunities is more likely to result in conception, because contractions of the cervix and vagina during orgasm transport semen deeper into the reproductive tract.

And that is what Dr Puts found. He and his team recruited 70 couples and asked the women how they rated their men's masculinity and attractiveness, and how often and when they orgasmed. They also asked independent observers to rate the men's faces, and found broad agreement with the ratings from partners.

As they predicted, women whose menfolk had attractive, masculine faces orgasmed more often during intercourse. They did not, by contrast, orgasm more frequently during masturbation or other sexual activity. The extra orgasms also came at the same time as the man's climax—just when they would do the most good for conception. Women are thus choosing which men father their children not only in whom they take to bed, but in how they react to them, sexually. The consequence, since looks are inherited, is that their sons, too, will be sexy. Whether they will be cheats and liars is another matter.