Can someone's political views be predicted from their face?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

Why Do Men Dominate Chess? Carole Hooven examines why men comprise the overwhelming majority of chess grandmasters. She argues that neither higher intelligence among male chess players, nor sexism towards female chess players, can explain much of the overrepresentation. Rather, she suggests that men’s greater obsessiveness leads them to practice more and thereby gain mastery of the game.

Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes. Oskari Lahtinen tests a scale for measuring critical social justice attitudes in two Finnish samples. He finds that the scale has good psychometric properties. He also finds that women score substantially higher than men, and the scale is associated with leftism, depression, anxiety, and inversely with happiness. 

Perseverance, a Measure of Conscientiousness, Is a Valid Predictor of Achievement and Truancy Across the Globe. Luyao Zhang and colleagues examine whether conscientiousness is a useful construct in different cultures. Analysing PISA data for 62 countries/regions, they find that perseverance (a measure of conscientiousness) is consistently related to both achievement and truancy. The associations are predominantly linear.