You can tell if someone’s rich or poor by looking at their face

Curious as to how the undergraduates were able to complete the task so successfully, Rule and Bjornsdottir next isolated specific facial features that might be cuing income status and conducted another test. Mouths were found to be the best wealth cues, although eyes were a strong indicator of income as well. What the authors eventually discovered, however, was that more significant than any specific part of the face was the apparent happiness of the face as a whole. Even the subtlest signs of positivity in a face, they concluded, were strong indicators of a higher social class.

“Once we figured out it was these subtle emotional expressions, it makes a lot of sense that the mouth would be showing most of that, because the mouth is what you mostly use, especially with positive emotions, like smiling,” Rule says. The perceivers were also homing in on the eyes, because eyes, too, are strong indicators of happiness — especially as indicators of repeated past happiness. “Crow’s-feet around eyes refer to contractions of their reticular oculi muscles, which are activated when someone smiles,” Rule explains.