Show a stranger a photograph of a teenager and ask how old she is, and the odds are good they will guess too high. Hand them a picture of a woman in her sixties and the guess tends to drift the other way, shaving off a couple of years. Somewhere in the middle, around the early forties, the eye gets it roughly right. This is not a quirk of one careless observer. It is a pattern that held across more than sixteen thousand judgement New! Sign up for our email newsletter on Substack.