Our educators, politicians and activists like to remind us that we must not judge people by their appearance. Such judgement is supposedly morally abhorrent and provides no useful information. But how true is that? Are we good at forming some accurate judgements based on a person's appearance or not?

Scientific research says yes, we are quite good at getting some very relevant information. A recent study shows that people can accurately judge the upper-body strength of men based on only a photo, even if that photo only shows the face. Judging the strength of women is less accurate (not surprising when one considers how many elite female athletes have pretty, feminine faces), but we are still better at it than if we were guessing randomly. This capability is applicable very broadly - US university students are equally accurate no matter whether they are attempting to rate others like themselves, Bolivian farmers or Andean pastoralists - so it is not limited only to one's own race and culture. It even works on guys who lift weights, whom one might expect to be disproportionately strong compared to their face.

Strength isn't the only thing we're good at judging . For example, women can also judge whether a man is interested in children from only a photo of his face. But being a guy, I guess I just didn't find that as interesting.

We also have some idea of specifically what aspects of a face make someone look like a tough guy - another recent study found that male hockey players with broader faces received more penalty minutes. I suppose progressives could see these unequal outcomes as evidence that officials are biased against broad-faced men. Fortunately guys with lots of penalty minutes get many of them for fighting. The difference between fighting and not fighting tends to be quite clear-cut, so an unfair system cannot explain the variance in penalty minutes.

Hockey players tend to be white and not too poor, so open-minded progressives don't really care and this study has even been reported by some mainstream media. The whiteness of the participants raises another point - that this within-race difference does not necessarily mean analogous between-race differences. For example, one would expect that in a mostly-Eskimo league broader-faced Eskimo players would probably receive more fighting majors than narrower-faced Eskimo players, but Eskimos (who tend to have broad faces) would not necessarily be penalized for fighting more often than whites in a mixed-race league.

Of course, appearance is not the only data or the most accurate data available to us, but it's good to know that we are good at making quick and dirty judgements based on it. All this makes sense from an evolutionary viewpoint - human interactions can be violent, especially when interacting with a male, and we've had thousands of years during which it's been very useful to quickly realize whether we're dealing with potentially capable opponent. Other animals which have violent interactions with their own species are also good at making similar judgements. It is implausible that humans would not have such capabilities only because otherwise well-meaning 21st-century progressives would feel very sad.