If you want to know if a man can be trusted, look hard at his face.

Those with a wider visage tend to be more devious and more willing to cheat, say researchers. Thinner-featured men are more likely to be honest and open. The findings suggest that celebrities such as David Tennant and Hugh Laurie are more trustworthy than womanising Jack Nicholson or potato-faced Wayne Rooney. Although the discovery is reminiscent of phrenology(2) the Victorian belief that personal characteristics are revealed in the shape of the head the scientists say the findings are based on two sound scientific experiments. Dr Michael Haselhuhn, who led the study at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, said: We demonstrate that men with wider faces feel more powerful, and these feelings of power lead directly to less ethical behaviour, including lying and cheating. Perhaps some men truly are bad to the bone. Most evolutionary scientists have dismissed the idea that physical appearance can reveal whether someone is honest or dishonest. If a physical trait(3) such as a wide face or having narrow eyes really did reveal negative personality traits, those people would be less likely to find partners and have children. Over thousands of years of natural selection, the trait would vanish. However, Dr Haselhuhn argues that physical clues to dishonesty could survive if they were also linked to qualities seen as positive by women such as charm or resourcefulness. The researchers carried out two experiments. In the first, 192 U.S. business students were asked to take part in a role-playing game. In pairs they took the parts of a house seller who will only agree to sell their home if it is preserved and a buyer who wants to convert the property into a hotel. During the game, the pairs negotiated by email until a deal was struck. Men with broader faces were more likely to lie about their intentions(4) than men with narrow faces. However, the width to height ratio of womens faces made no difference to their behaviour, the researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In the second study, 103 students were given a chance to enter a lottery for a $50 prize.

They were told they could enter more than once, but that the number of times they entered would depend on the roll of two dice. They were trusted to roll the dice and enter the total into a computer unsupervised. The men with broader faces claimed that they scored far higher on the dice than men with thinner faces, suggesting that they were more willing to cheat. A questionnaire carried out before the experiment also revealed that broader faced men also felt they were more powerful. This sense of power directly affected their ethical behaviour, the researchers report.