What is up with the Narcissist Eyebrows?

A study was published in April 2018 in the Journal of Personality and awarded an Ig Nobel Prize this September, is titled "Eyebrows cue grandiose narcissism," and suggests that people with bushier brows are more likely to act self-centered and entitled. To study this, researchers Miranda Giacomin and Nicholas Rule first took "neutral expression" portraits of 39 students at University of Toronto. 26 of the photo subjects were female and 13 were male and 32 of the subjects were white, while seven were non-white. The average age of the photo subjects was 21. Then, the 39 subjects took a standardized narcissistic personality test to determine where they fell on the spectrum. They were asked how much they agree with statement like, "If I ruled the world it would bea better place" and "I find it easy to manipulate people," which are sentiments a classic narcissist would believe. Volunteers had to guess who was more narcissistic Next, the researchers had 28 virtual volunteers look at the portraits and rate them on a scale from 1 (not narcissistic at all) to 8 (extremely narcissistic), after the researcher defined a narcissist as someone who is "egotistical, self-focused, and vain." The researchers also flipped the images upside down, because research has shown this allows the human eye to look at individual facial features one by one, rather than grouping them all together. Then, they had a different group of 27 volunteers rate the images. For the third part of the experiment, researchers put opaque black boxes over the photo subjects' eyes or eyebrows, and then asked volunteers to rate their perceived narcissism levels to see which facial features most accurately tipped them off. Eyebrows were always the giveaway, the researchers found The researchers found that study volunteers were able to pinpoint which photo subjects were narcissists when they were shown both their eyebrows and eyes. The volunteers were inaccurate when shown just the subjects' eye and no eyebrows, though. "We essentially conducted a long series of experiments where we narrowed the face features further and further down until we isolated the eyebrows as being the primary cue for people's narcissism.