The California Institute of Technology (CalTech) just published a rather silly study under the catchy title of “Perspective Distortion from Interpersonal Distance Is an Implicit Visual Cue for Social Judgments of Faces”. The study claims to show that “the distance at which facial photos are taken influences perception.” The authors of the study even say they’ve broken new ground. (Yes, every photographer is laughing at this.)
Here’s the CalTech press release and the study. Feel free to read them but the study just duplicates what every experienced photographer, model and actor have known for +90 years:
(i) If someone takes your picture with a short lens, the closer they stand to you when taking the picture, the more distorted, or unflattering, the picture will be. (It’s just well-known physics.)
(ii) An unflattering portrait tends to create unfavourable opinions in people who view that portrait. (It’s just well-known human behaviour.)
This CalTech study certainly qualifies for a Captain Obvious award.
The study’s abstract states:
The basis on which people make social judgments from the image of a face remains an important open problem in fields ranging from psychology to neuroscience and economics. Multiple cues from facial appearance influence the judgments that viewers make.
Here we investigate the contribution of a novel cue: the change in appearance due to the perspective distortion that results from viewing distance.
We found that photographs of faces taken from within personal space elicit lower investments in an economic trust game, and lower ratings of social traits (such as trustworthiness, competence, and attractiveness), compared to photographs taken from a greater distance.
Unfortunately, the study confused short photography distances (i.e. “within personal space”) with short focal lengths. Contrary to what the study concluded, visual cues taken from portraits are not related to distance but rather to focal length (and camera angle, lighting, subject pose…). It also confused “viewing distance” with photography distance.
Every news photographer knows that close-up pictures have the most visual impact and create the strongest visual cues for the viewer. Although this may not be appropriate for business portraits, this look can work very well for editorial and consumer portraits, if done correctly (hint: it has nothing to do with distance but rather focal length and camera angle).
Every professional photographer knows how to choose the proper focal length for the distance as well as the proper pose and camera angle to minimize any distortion.
The study’s introduction repeated some well-worn (but still important) facts:
We glean a wealth of socially relevant information from faces in the blink of an eye: gender, emotion, and whether a person is attractive, competent, threatening, or trustworthy, to mention a few. For example, reliable judgments of trustworthiness can be made from faces viewed for 100 ms or less, and such judgments are found to influence real world behavior, such as voting, interest rates on person to person loans, and behavior in economic trust games.
This previous paragraph can serve as an important reminder to companies looking to get business portraits made. Having business portraits done properly can (and does) have a positive effect. However, if done poorly, the resulting effect can be quite the opposite.
For better or worse, we judge a book (a person) by its cover (their portrait). The purpose of a business portrait or executive portrait is to show the public that the company employee is competent, trustworthy and worth doing business with. Experienced corporate photographers know how to create this type of portrait.
If CalTech really wanted to break new ground, and waste more money, it would do a study explaining why self-portraits taken with a cell phone always look bad.**
** Update March 2018: Well someone finally did a study of why selfies with a cell phone always look bad.
