Word: wolffe
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From these superficial appearances, observers described the character of Wolff's group with a high degree of unanimity and accuracy. With a consistency ranging from 40% to 90% better than pure chance, they matched the right hands with the right face, a person's storytelling style with his handwriting, his voice with a description of his personality. Even children and insane people showed some shrewdness at this game...
...Science. From this phase of his experiments, Psychologist Wolff drew a few significant conclusions: since everyone has some conflicting traits, which show up in contradictions in his appearance, a person's character can be read much more reliably from a combination of elements than from any single one (such as the face or handwriting); actors and artists, who relied on a general impression, were better at character-reading than scientists or philosophers, who relied more on analysis...
These discoveries were scarcely surprising. But Wolff's most significant findings came from his guinea pigs' efforts to read their own character...
...confesses that he stumbled on this line of investigation when he walked into a dressing room in a tailor shop one day, found himself confronted by a strange man, fled. It turned out that he had seen himself in a mirror. Thereupon Psychologist Wolff began to confront his guinea pigs with their own pictures and records (mingled with others), with surprising results: only one in ten recognized his own recorded voice, most failed to recognize their own profiles, hands, mirrored hand writing, or speaking rhythm. Half failed to identify their storytelling style. But perversely, every person recognized his own gait...
Trickiest stunt Wolff used was to split a full-faced picture down the middle, reverse one half and match it with the same half by montage, so that the picture was composed of two right sides or two left. The right side, he found, tends to be dominant, gives the face its most characteristic expression (the mouth usually is most expressive...