Co-authored by Bella Bobrow. Contains spoilers for "Frankenstein" (2025).

What features of Frankenstein’s creature make him fearsome to villagers who stumble upon him in the forest? Is it his imposing height, his torn jacket, or his face, pallid and crisscrossed with deep scars? The new film’s director, Guillermo Del Toro, says that “the most interesting landscape in the world is the human face,” and this is a face from which we have much to learn.1

In empirical aesthetics, physical features like burns, scars, and paralyses are referred to as facial anomalies or facial differences. At first glance, people with these features are often perceived as less moral, less competent, and less trustworthy.2,3 This judgment is known as the “anomalous-is-bad” stereotype.

There is little scientific consensus on whether our bias against people with physical anomalies is innate or learned. One theory is that a facial wound signals disease or poor survival skills. It would have been evolutionarily advantageous for others to distance themselves from people with anomalies. Whether or not these signals are the origin of the common bias, the prejudice is unwarranted.

To better appreciate how deeply rooted this bias is, researchers at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics (PCfN) looked toward a hunter-gatherer tribe, the Hadza, in northern Tanzania, with little exposure to Western ideas of........

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