No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Judgments of Power From College Yearbook Photos and Later Career Success
Abstract
Inferences from faces can predict important real-world outcomes. But little is known about the stability of these effects. Here the authors find that inferences of power from photos of the faces of the managing partners of America’s top 100 law firms significantly corresponded to their success as leaders, as measured by the amounts of profits that their firms earned. More interesting, this relationship was also observed when judgments were made based on photos of the leaders taken from their undergraduate yearbooks, before they began their careers or entered law school. Facial cues to success may therefore be consistent across much of the lifespan (approximately 20–50 years).
... Going beyond attractiveness, Rule and Ambady (2011) demonstrated that impressions of law firm managing partners' facial power (dominance and facial maturity) predicted their leadership and career success, as measured by their firms' profits. Importantly, perceivers made these judgments of power from undergraduate photos taken decades earlier. ...
... Attractiveness and health (which strongly interrelated) also served as valid and utilized cues in that work and can furthermore be tied to real class differences in health (e.g., Marmot et al., 1991), the relation between attractiveness and higher class standing demonstrated in other work (e.g., Judge et al., 2009), and stereotypes of higher class individuals as attractive (e.g., Kalick, 1988). In the current research, I moreover tested the role of competence, which is stereotypically associated with higher class , as well as dominance and facial maturity, Mueller & Mazur, 1996;Rule & Ambady, 2011). Finally, I tested whether gender typicality (women's femininity, men's masculinity) played any role in cueing social class standing, as extant research suggests that gender typicality may vary by social class, at least for women (McGinn & Oh, 2017). ...
... These analyses revealed three factors, termed Attractiveness, Positivity, and 4 In my preregistration, I stated that I would collapse across dominance and facial maturity prior to performing the factor analysis. I instead included them separately, in order to test whether they would indeed load together, as they have in previous research (Rule & Ambady, 2011). I furthermore included affect in the factor analysis in order to provide a more consistent test of the cues. ...
Previous research demonstrates the visibility of social class from the face, as cued by differences in resting facial affect in neutral faces and differences in attractiveness in dating profile photos. This research, however, operationalized social class using only one measure: income. Social class standing consists of various related facets in addition to income, however, including education, occupational prestige, and subjective social class. It therefore remains unknown whether accurate perceptions of social class are specific to income, or whether the face reflects social class more generally. To address this gap, I tested the visibility of social class in two stimulus sets, standardized photos of Canadian undergraduates and yearbook photos of Icelandic secondary school graduates, each of which defined social class somewhat differently. Previous work on the visibility of social class from the face furthermore focused only on whether perceivers could distinguish those of higher class from those of lower class, leaving unclear whether greater nuance in social class standing might be detectable from the face. To explore this question, I used more detailed measures of targets' social class and asked perceivers to make judgments along multi-point scales. Extant work moreover only demonstrates the visibility of social class background, but other research on predictive judgments from the face (e.g., career success) suggests that the face may hold hints of future class standing-I tested this possibility here. Finally, the current work tested whether the facial cues to social class were consistent iii across economic context, photo type, and time. My findings indicate that facial appearance reflects the underlying construct of social class (rather than just certain facets of class) and does so in a graded manner, with different degrees of social class standing discernable from the face. Across both stimulus sets, greater Positivity (affect and warmth) and Attractiveness (attractiveness, competence, and health) cued higher background social class standing, suggesting that social class impacts appearance similarly across economic contexts. The cues to future social class diverged from this, however. Overall, this work provides a clearer idea of the relationship between social class standing and facial appearance.
... This positive treatment is likely to have a strong influence on global self-worth (Harter, 2006). Second, individuals who look leader-like might be treated and accepted as leaders more often, SELF-EVALUATIONS AND LEADERSHIP APPEARANCE 8 positively affecting their CSEs and providing them more opportunities to develop their (leadership) skills-in other words, a self-fulfilling prophecy (e.g., Antonakis, 2011;Friedman & Zebrowitz, 1992;Rule & Ambady, 2011). Consistent with these ideas, individuals with the right look may be more confident in their abilities and more likely to be considered leaders (DeRue & Ashford, 2010;Judge et al., 2009;Mobius & Rosenblat, 2006). ...
... We offer these speculations tentatively, because they involve processes that would be difficult to test directly, requiring substantial future work before permitting strong conclusions. Moreover, self-fulfilling prophecies could explain why appearance, CSEs, and success relate, given that individuals who look like leaders may be treated like leaders and the provided leadership experiences allow them to develop leadership ability, further reinforcing the initial impression (Antonakis & Eubanks, 2017;Rule & Ambady, 2011;Todorov, Olivola, Dotsch, & Mende-Siedlecki, 2015). Thus, an individual might not possess leadership ability at the outset but cultivate it as a byproduct of fitting an apparent leader prototype. ...
... ). Although previous research showing that facial cues predict leadership outcomes decades later casts doubt on the latter(Mueller & Mazur, 1996, Rule & Ambady, 2011; see also ...
Although the link between facial appearance and success is well established, the mechanisms responsible for this association have remained elusive. Evolutionary theory suggests that perceived leadership characteristics should be important for men’s self-concept. Drawing on implicit leadership theory and evolutionary perspectives, we therefore examined the associations between first impressions based on facial appearance, core self-evaluations (CSEs), leadership role occupancy, and career success among a sample of working men. In Study 1, we found that CSEs mediated the relationship between individuals’ facial appearance and measures of their success as leaders. In Study 2, we replicated these results using children’s ratings of facial appearance, thus suggesting that basic properties of the targets’ faces communicated their leadership ability more than the perceivers’ life experience or acquired knowledge. These results suggest that people may use facial appearance as a diagnostic tool to determine the leadership ability of others.
... This research identifying the association between apparent competence from face and real-world leadership choices has been carried out usually in the West and mainly on high-level leaders such as elite politicians [12,14,[17][18][19] and chief executive officers (CEOs) of top performing organisations [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. Other studies have demonstrated that distinctive facial features are favoured for leadership under different contexts. ...
... MTurk was chosen for its ability to recruit a large, diverse sample of participants efficiently, which enhances the generalisability and reliability of the findings [71,72]. Previous research has indicated that a sample size of around 20-50 participants per trait is sufficient to form reliable judgements of faces [2,73] in cross-racial perception studies [25,74]. This random sampling strategy is effective as it allows access to a broad demographic that is representative of the general population, ensuring robust and valid data for the study [75]. ...
The attributions made to faces are well described by two dimensions of apparent trustworthiness (valence or warmth) and apparent competence (dominance and power) (Todorov A, Mende-Siedlecki P, Dotsch R. Curr Opin Neurobiol, 2013, 23, 373–80). This model has been extended to include a third dimension of apparent age and attractiveness (Sutherland CAM, Oldmeadow JA, Santos IM, Towler J, Michael Burt D, Young AW. Cognition, 2013, 127, 105–18). Previous research has tested the association between appearance and leadership attainment for high-level leaders such as elite politicians and chief executive officers of top performing organisations in the US and Western Europe. Here we focus on a Chinese organisational context and explore how facial attributions are associated with appointment at mid-level managerial positions. Participants rated leadership, competence, trustworthiness, attractiveness and age of faces of male employees of a Chinese Real Estate company. Our findings reveal that apparent trustworthiness and age are more critical predictors of leadership attainment than competence or attractiveness in the context of mid-level management in China. The study supports the three-dimensional attribution framework and reaffirms the importance of facial cues in leadership selection across diverse cultural settings.
... responses: Bagnis et al., 2020; hiring and promotion decisions: Graham et al., 2017;Rule & Ambady, 2008, 2011. The goal of the present study was to examine how the formation of first impressions from facial cues is affected by occlusion of the lower half of the face when wearing a face mask. ...
... Future studies should examine how facial masks influence behavioural outcomes for individuals in other social contexts in which first impressions are known to have an impact (e.g., in deciding who to vote for: Antonakis & Dalgas, 2009;Castelli et al., 2009;Todorov et al., 2005;hiring, Graham et al., 2017;Rule & Ambady, 2008, 2011healthcare, Bagnis et al., 2020; and economic trust games, Ewing et al., 2015;Ewing et al., 2019;Rosati et al., 2019). Masks impair face identification (Carragher & Hancock, 2020;Freud et al., 2020;Marini et al., 2021;Noyes et al., 2021) and emotion perception (Carbon, 2020;Grundmann et al., 2021;Marini et al., 2021;Noyes et al., 2021), though they may have limited influence on first impressions. ...
Considering the widespread use of face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, the goal of the current study was to examine how occlusion of the lower half of the face may impact first impression formation. We conducted three experiments, each building on previous research, investigating the effect of face masks on first impressions of faces across the lifespan (children, young and older adults). Experiment 1 examined whether the mandatory influence of happy facial expressions on perceived trustworthiness in young adult faces is influenced by face masks. Experiment 2 examined behavioural consequences of adults’ first impressions of child faces to determine whether masks reduce the effect of facial niceness on interpretations of ambiguous behaviour. Experiment 3 investigated consensus for first impressions of trustworthiness and competence in older adult faces with and without masks, as well as consensus on underlying facial cues. The results of all three experiments present converging evidence that masks do not have a significant impact on first impressions and their behavioural consequences.
... Harms et al. (2012) extended these results using a sample of Chinese CEOs, showing that naïve ratings of risk-taking, a culturally appropriate leadership trait in China, were positively associated with organizational performance. In yet another study, Rule and Ambady (2011) obtained the undergraduate yearbook pictures of the managing partners of America's top 100 law firms and found that naïve ratings of power predicted of firm profits. ...
... Specifically, a conscientious appearance may be the cause of better academic performance through expectancy and self-fulfilling prophecy effects (cf. Rule and Ambady 2011). As highlighted in the Introduction of this paper, expectancy and self-fulfilling prophecies have been documented in childhood education when teachers give preferential treatment to those students that they expect will perform better; given the enhanced attention and increased learning opportunities, such students actually do perform better (Rosenthal 1994). ...
The present study examined whether the grade point averages (GPAs) of university students could be predicted from appearance-based ratings of their Conscientiousness. Undergraduate participants (N = 249) provided self-reports of their Big Five personality traits and copies of their student transcripts from which their GPAs were obtained. Photographs of these undergraduates were then taken from which their personality traits were judged by unacquainted perceivers. Both aggregated and single perceiver-ratings of Conscientiousness predicted GPA. Aggregated perceiver-ratings predicted GPA incrementally over self-ratings, suggesting that appearance-based judgements of Conscientiousness may contain trait-relevant information beyond the scope of self-reports. These results contribute to a growing literature documenting the validity of appearance-based judgements of personality traits.
... For example, trait ratings by naïve participants based solely on a photograph correlated with trait ratings by the pictured men and women themselves (Little & Perrett, 2007). Ratings of power based on the headshots of managing partners at law firms correlated with several measures of law firm success (Rule & Ambady, 2011). Moreover, perceptions of facial appearance predicted success in elections. ...
... Although gender stereotypes undoubtedly play a role in ratings of male and female faces on gender-linked traits, this cannot be the only factor driving the ratings because some ratings predicted company rank and profits for men and women CEOs. This finding of significant predictive ability is compatible with previous research demonstrating that ratings based on facial appearance predict objective measures of success (e.g., Berggren et al., 2010;Frieze et al., 1991;Rule & Ambady, 2011;Todorov et al., 2005). ...
... Even in cases where success is not defined by popular opinion, as it is for electoral success, researchers have found that outcomes can be predicted from facial cues. For instance, the financial performance of Fortune 1000 companies and top law firms can be judged significantly better than chance guessing from photos of the faces of their leading executives (Rule & Ambady, 2008, 2011a, 2011bRule & Tskhay, 2014). Thus, the use of leadership prototypes can predict both the subjective consensus of other people as well as objective measures of leadership. ...
... Furthermore, the tenure of the conductors in a given group could also result in leadership success due to increased congruence between leaders and followers who have worked together for a greater number of musical performances. Previous studies examining the success of business leaders did not find any relationship between tenure and accuracy in perceiving leadership, however (Rule & Ambady, 2011a, 2011bRule & Tskhay, 2014). Naturally, this might differ in the present domain in which leaders and followers engage in much closer interactions than they do in the corporate hierarchy. ...
Research has suggested that people can extract information relevant to leadership from thin slices of behavior. Nearly all of this research has been conducted in the context of large organizations where the relationships between leaders and followers are relatively indirect, however. We therefore examined here whether participants could extract similar information about leadership success from contexts with direct leader–follower interactions: conductors of orchestras. We found that perceivers could accurately discern conductors' success from brief video clips and that perceptions of expressiveness and age formed the basis for this accuracy. Thus, the current work demonstrates that leadership success is perceptible from nonverbal cues not only for the leaders of large organizations, but also in the context of groups where leaders and followers must continually and dynamically interact to produce successful outcomes.
... This rapid process of social categorization not only activates mental representations for a specific social category but also triggers the associated stereotype content associated with them (Freeman and Ambady, 2009;Hugenberg and Bodenhausen, 2003). The immediate impressions formed about an individual's face have significant consequences in the real world, including employment, political, financial, and judicial outcomes (Rule et al., 2016;Olivola and Todorov, 2010;Rule and Ambady, 2011;Todorov et al., 2005;Zebrowitz and McDonald, 1991). The stereotypes individuals hold about scientists, regarding their demographic traits and their other characteristics, may be reflected in their mental representations. ...
Introduction
Stereotypes and biases toward social categories are often reflected in mental representations of faces. The current study used a two-phase reverse correlation procedure to visualize mental representations of the faces of a scientist, a hero, a genius, and a person.
Methods
In the first phase, 20 participants completed four blocks of a two-image forced-choice task. In each block, they selected which face from a pair resembled one of the four categories. The images they selected were averaged to create classification images (CIs), which serve as proxy images for their mental representations of the four categories. In the second phase of the study, 251 naive participants rated the CIs based on various valence and demographic characteristics.
Results
We found that the scientist image was rated predominantly as White and male, which reflects stereotypes about who pursues scientific careers. The scientist image was also rated more negatively than the other CIs on several characteristics, which may indicate negative biases toward scientists as unsociable, poor communicators, and incompetent authority figures, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Discussion
These findings deepen our understanding of how social categories are represented and demonstrate how the CI method can reveal stereotypes and attitudes related to these social categories.
... Those presentations were snapshots of students' experiences and thus do not capture the nuances of dynamics that unfolded throughout the semester that likely influenced the final presentations that we observed. Future research should address this limitation by observing students' behaviors multiple times throughout the semester, though it is worth noting that a large body of research on "snap judgments" demonstrates that even small snapshots like we observed can be predictive of long-term outcomes (Rule & Ambady, 2011a, 2011b. ...
Societies realize the value of increasing the number of engineering and other STEM graduates, yet universities often struggle to enroll and retain STEM students, particularly women. To remedy this, many engineering programs have shifted their pedagogical approaches to include project-based learning in group settings. However, prior research on engineering teams revealed, for example, gender gaps in active participation, reflecting stereotypes of men as engineering experts and women as supporters. In the current study, we examined the long-term correlates of such gaps. Specifically, in a mixed-method study (behavioral observation, surveys, and longitudinal follow-up) we found gender differences in active technical participation during students’ first year in engineering project group presentations, such that men engaged in more active participation than women (N = 589). Longitudinal follow-ups in their final year revealed that first year technical participation was a predictor of feelings of belonging, and these feelings of belonging in turn predict retention in engineering majors and intentions to pursue graduate education in engineering. Together, these results suggest that the first year engineering team experience plays an important role in retaining students and highlight opportunities for early interventions.
... The last decade of face perception research suggests trustworthiness and dominance are the primary dimensions that underlie first impressions from faces (Sutherland et al., 2016;Todorov et al., 2008;Vernon et al., 2014). While these first impressions are often inaccurate (Dixson, 2018;Rule et al., 2013;Todorov, 2017), they inform people's subsequent behaviour towards others in laboratory settings (Chang et al., 2010;Centorrino et al., 2015), and also in daily life-predicting career success (Rule & Ambady, 2008;Rule & Ambady, 2011), criminal sentencing (Wilson & Rule, 2015), and election outcomes (Ballew & Todorov, 2007;Castelli et al., 2009;Todorov, et al, 2005). This valence -dominance model of face perception also generalised across 11,570 participants from 41 countries (Jones et al., 2021), highlighting its importance to the formation of first impressions cross-culturally. ...
How face perceptions unfold during ontogeny shapes how humans navigate adult social life. A vast literature implicates variation in sexually dimorphic facial characteristics in guiding judgments relating to suites of key life choices, ranging from partner choices to preferences for leaders. Although growing evidence supports that facial morphology underpins children's first impressions from faces, whether these impressions influence children's predictions about others' behaviour remains unclear. We contrasted the influence of men's facial hair, a highly sexually dimorphic masculine trait, on children's explicit (Who looks strong/trustworthy) vs. implicit first impressions (Who do you want to tell your secret to/fight dragons?). While reading a storybook, children (N = 80; 4.5-12.0 years) and adults (N = 134), selected one of two twins (two images of the same identity, one bearded and one clean-shaven) to help them face a challenge requiring either a trustworthy or a dominant social partner. In control tasks, participants selected the strongest and most trustworthy member of each pair and then pointed to which face regions informed their decision. In the implicit task, both the probability of selecting a bearded partner and differential selection of bearded partners as a function of relevant trait increased with age. Selections in the explicit task were more adult-like and age-related changes in which facial cues participants used was surprisingly small. Thus, adult-like patterns in predicting other's behaviour based on facial cues to trustworthiness and dominance lag behind adult-like patterns in inferring traits based on facial cues, potentially because first impressions are of unreliable.
... For example, Todorov, Baron, and Oosterhof (2008) found that the two most important dimensions in face space tap trustworthiness and dominance. The first dimension refers to the quality of people to be reliable in their intention and is conceptually analogous to communion, whereas the latter dimension refers to the capability to be strong and is aligned with the agency dimension (see also Rule and Ambady 2011;Rule et al. 2013;Zebrowitz and Montepare 2005). ...
Two studies investigated how facial signals of communion and agency intersect to shape first impressions. Study 1 primarily investigated how enhancing or reducing facial signals of communion or agency affected impressions of these dimensions. Results demonstrated that the manipulation of facial signals of communion affected impressions of both communion and agency, whereas the manipulation of facial signals of agency affected only impressions of agency. Secondly, data from Study 1 were used to categorize the Basel Face Database stimuli into the four cells of the stereotype content model (SCM). Study 2 investigated how combined facial signals of communion and agency impact individuals’ evaluations, emotions and behavioural intentions towards targets. Results showed that communion signals in faces have a stronger impact on overall evaluations and behavioural intentions compared to agency signals. Furthermore, in line with the SCM, specific combinations of communion and agency evoked distinct emotions: admiration (high communion–high agency), pity (high communion–low agency) and contempt (low communion–low agency). Together, the research emphasizes the primary role of communion in social perception, highlighting theoretical and practical implications.
... In fact, although perceived competence of faces predicted voting outcomes in hypothetical elections in both the United States and South Korea when no other information was available, perceived competence was a better predictor of electoral outcomes in actual elections in the United States than in South Korea (Na et al., 2015). Furthermore, whereas perceived facial competence predicted company profits of U.S. companies (Rule & Ambady, 2008), this was not the case for Japanese companies . These results suggest that although perceived competence is relevant to rank conferral to some extent across cultures, it is likely weighted against other characteristics valued in other cultures. ...
Social hierarchy is one fundamental aspect of social living, structuring interactions in families, teams, and entire societies. In this review, we put forward a cultural psychological approach to social hierarchy, positing that rank differences are embedded within larger cultural meaning systems, which shape how high rank is attained or conferred and how social hierarchy affords behavior and psychology. We then examine manifestations of hierarchy in two cultural meaning systems: Western and East Asian cultural contexts. Accumulating evidence on collective, interpersonal, and individual processes suggests cultural similarities in self-orientation but cultural differences in other-orientation of high-ranking individuals. Such literature reveal how thought and behavior within social hierarchies and cultural beliefs, values, and norms mutually constitute each other. We close with a discussion of how the present review is a stepping stone for future research and of remaining questions to further advance social hierarchy research across wider and more diverse cultural contexts.
Public Abstract
Social hierarchy is one fundamental aspect of human life, structuring interactions in families, teams, and entire societies. In this review, we put forward a new theory about how social hierarchy is shaped by the wider societal contexts (i.e., cultures). Comparing East Asian and Western cultural contexts, we show how culture comprises societal beliefs about who can raise to high rank (e.g., become a leader), shapes interactions between high- and low-ranking individuals (e.g., in a team), and influences human thought and behavior in social hierarchies. Overall, we find cultural similarities, in that high-ranking individuals are agentic and self-oriented in both cultural contexts. But we also find important cross-cultural differences. In East Asian cultural contexts, high-ranking individuals are also other oriented; they are also concerned about the people around them and their relationships. We close with a call to action, suggesting studying social hierarchies in more diverse cultural contexts.
... First impressions form within 100 milliseconds (Willis & Todorov, 2006), tend to be stable across perceivers (Rule et al., 2013;Sutherland et al., 2020), and occur automatically (Ritchie et al., 2017;Thierry et al., 2021). Although rarely accurate (Rule et al., 2013), first impressions influence people's behaviour towards others, including voting decisions (Antonakis & Dalgas, 2009;Castelli et al., 2009;Todorov et al., 2005), criminal sentencing (Wilson & Rule, 2015), hiring and promotion in the workplace (Graham et al., 2017;Rule & Ambady, 2008, 2011, and emergency health care responses (Bagnis et al., 2020). Most studies have focused on first impressions of young adult (YA) faces; first impressions of older adults (OAs), a fast-growing age demographic, has received much less attention. ...
First impressions based on facial cues have the potential to influence how older adults (OAs), a vulnerable population, are treated by others. The present study used a data‐driven approach to examine dimensions underlying first impressions of OAs and whether those dimensions vary by perceiver age. In Experiment 1, young adult (YA) and OA participants provided unconstrained, written descriptions in response to OA faces. From these descriptors, 18 trait categories were identified that were similar, but not identical, across age groups. In Experiment 2, YA and OA participants rated OA faces on the trait words identified for their age group in Experiment 1. In separate principal components analyses, dimensions of sternness and confidence emerged for both groups. In Experiment 3, YA and OA participants rated these same faces on new words encompassing traits, emotion cues, and other appearance cues. Correlations between these ratings and factor scores showed that sternness is analogous to approachability for both age groups. Confidence is analogous to competence for both age groups and related to perceived age/health/attractiveness. Confidence was related to shyness for YAs but dominance for OAs. The current research has implications for a lifespan perspective on first impressions and informs functional accounts.
... In addition, research could examine whether some individuals are bound to be leaders of democratic or autocratic states. Research has found that inferences of leaders' power from yearbook photos can predict corporate success, indicating stability in traits used to predict success (Rule & Ambady, 2011). It may be possible to predict leadership style from photos of politicians before they even entered positions of power (e.g., Rule & Ambady, 2010a). ...
Despite the many important considerations relevant to selecting a leader, facial appearance carries surprising sway. Following numerous studies documenting the role of facial appearance in government elections, we investigated differences in perceptions of dictators versus democratically elected leaders. Participants in Study 1 successfully classified pictures of 160 world leaders as democrats or dictators significantly better than chance. Probing what distinguished them, separate participants rated the affect, attractiveness, competence, dominance, facial maturity, likability, and trustworthiness of the leaders’ faces in Study 2. Relating these perceptions to the categorizations made by participants in Study 1 showed that democratically elected leaders looked significantly more attractive and warmer (an average of likability and trustworthiness) than dictators did. Leaders’ facial appearance could therefore contribute to their success within their respective political systems.
... One interesting question that follows from these findings is whether "looks of leadership" are consistent across time or whether they are acquired through the experience of leadership. In this respect, Rule and Ambady (2011a) found that inferences of power made from the pictures of managing partners at law firms predicted the amount of profits these firms made -even when the pictures were from college yearbooks and had been taken roughly 20 to 50 years earlier. Hence, the "facial features associated with leadership […] appear to be present early in adult life, and thus are likely not the product of experiencing the pressures associated with obtaining and holding leadership roles" (Re & Rule, 2016b: 86). ...
In this article, we aim to replicate and extend a study that has revealed a link between naïve personality and leadership judgments and company profits. Rule and Ambady (2008) found that power-and leadership-related perceptions derived from CEOs' faces were significantly related to company profits. In our follow-up study and extension, we focus on CEO succession events to explore the longitudinal relationship between personality-and leadership-related perception ratings and company performance. We study the context of CEO successions to test whether variations in personality-and leadership-related perceptions from CEO faces are related to company performance and whether variations in company performance are associated with the type of CEO that is chosen. We can replicate the original correlative leadership effect using a temporal extension of the analysis horizon but fail to replicate the link between CEO leadership perceptions and company performance when using a different measure of performance and a different analytical approach to account for the longitudinal nature of our data. Our results have important implications for further theorizing on the relationship between subjective leadership perceptions and objective performance measures.
... It is hypothesized that these facial clues evolved from the preparatory or support responses associated with attack or defense. Facial characteristics such as chin prominence, heaviness of brow ridges, and facial muscularity were also found to be predictive on current and future social status and reproductive success of their holders (Mueller and Mazur 1997;Rule and Ambady 2010). ...
... One of the plans for future research is to investigate other types of classes and also to investigate simultaneous separation of multiple classes. Second, information on the facial features that pre-dates the CEO appointment stemming from for instance college yearbook photos seems a promising avenue to explore the causality issue mentioned above [47][48]. ...
Research overwhelmingly shows that facial appearance predicts leader selection. However , the evidence on the relevance of faces for actual leader ability and consequently performance is inconclusive. By using a state-of-the-art, objective measure for face recognition, we test the predictive value of CEOs' faces for firm performance in a large sample of faces. We first compare the faces of Fortune500 CEOs with those of US citizens and professors. We find clear confirmation that CEOs do look different when compared to citizens or professors, replicating the finding that faces matter for selection. More importantly, we also find that faces of CEOs of top performing firms do not differ from other CEOs. Based on our advanced face recognition method, our results suggest that facial appearance matters for leader selection but that it does not do so for leader performance.
... All three models were estimated using the Lavaan package (Rosseel, 2012). Overall model fit was assessed with the model chi-square statistic and its associated p value, the comparative fit index (CFI), the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), and the standardized root mean squared residual (SRMR). ...
We examined how self-determination, the subjective experience of one’s behavior as internally initiated and personally endorsed, depends on one’s standing in real-world social hierarchies. We predicted that those with the traits most relevant to status attainment would be those afforded the most opportunities to be self-determining. We examined the trait of physical attractiveness, given its documented association with social status and no known association with self-determination. First-year undergraduates living in same-sex residences rated their housemates’ social status, while an independent set of observers rated the participants’ physical attractiveness. Consistent with prediction, physically attractive individuals attained the highest levels of social status; in turn, those who attained the highest levels of social status experienced the highest levels of self-determination. These findings provide new insights into self-determination as an inherently relational phenomenon and specifically highlight the formative influence of social status on people’s capacities for self-determination.
... For instance, research by Ambady and Rosenthal (1993) found that "thin slice" judgments based on brief (30 second), muted, video clips of class lectures were significantly correlated with actual student and principal ratings of teacher performance. Judgments made on the basis of student year book photos can predict later career success (Rule & Ambady, 2011a) and ratings based on facial characteristics can help predict military rank attainment (Mazur, Mazur, & Keating, 1984;Mueller & Mazur, 1996). Several studies have demonstrated that ratings of political candidates' facial characteristics predict electoral success (e.g., Ballew & Todorov, 2007;Hall, Goren, Chaiken, & Todorov, 2009;Little, Burriss, Jones, & Roberts, 2007;Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, & Hall, 2005). ...
Evolutionary theory and neuroscientific evidence suggest that humans automatically infer the trustworthiness of others based on facial appearance. Building upon this knowledge base, this article presents three empirical studies that investigate the influence of initial impressions of trustworthiness on post-event perceptions of justice. Across two vignette studies and one laboratory study, the results consistently suggest that pre-event trustworthiness impressions exert significant indirect effects on post-event justice perceptions. In Study 1 and 2 the effects of trustworthiness were mediated by individuals’ psychological state of trust and fairness-related counterfactual thinking, respectively. In Study 3, the indirect effect of trustworthiness was transmitted through the psychological state of trust alone. The finding that initial trustworthiness impressions derived from surface cues (facial appearance) help shape subsequent perceptions of justice has important implications for justice theory and research.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Individuals form impressions of others’ social‐class standing from nonverbal information, including facial appearance. Whether the facial cues relating to (perceptions of) social class generalize across different contexts and class measures (e.g., income and subjective status) remains unknown. We tested which facial cues relate to actual and perceived social class using multiple social‐class measures in two contexts: Canada (using contemporary lab‐based photos) and Iceland (using mid‐20th‐century yearbook photos). Results show that facial appearance reveals and predicts impressions of social class broadly (vs. only for specific measures). Greater facial Attractiveness (attractiveness/competence/health) and Positivity (affect/warmth) related to higher social‐class standing in both contexts, suggesting that social class influences facial appearance similarly in different environments. Attractiveness also primarily explained social‐class perceptions. Validity and utilization of other cues, however, differed between contexts, and we observed perception accuracy only for Canadian targets. These findings provide a more complete understanding of accuracy and bias in perceiving social class.
In a time where new research methods are constantly being developed and science is evolving, researchers must continually educate themselves on cutting-edge methods and best practices related to their field. The second of three volumes, this Handbook provides comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of a variety of issues important in developing, designing, and collecting data to produce high-quality research efforts. First, leading scholars from around the world provide an in depth explanation of various advanced methodological techniques. In section two, chapters cover general important methodological considerations across all types of data collection. In the third section, the chapters cover self-report and behavioral measures and their considerations for use. In the fourth section, various psychological measures are covered. The final section of the handbook covers issues that directly concern qualitative data collection approaches. Throughout the book, examples and real-world research efforts from dozens of different disciplines are discussed.
As our society ages, questions concerning the relations between generations gain importance. The quality of human relations depends on the quality of emotion communication, which is a significant part of our daily interactions. Emotion expressions serve not only to communicate how the expresser feels, but also to communicate intentions (whether to approach or retreat) and personality traits (such as dominance, trustworthiness, or friendliness) that influence our decisions regarding whether and how to interact with a person. Emotion Communication by the Aging Face and Body delineates how aging affects emotion communication and person perception by bringing together research across multiple disciplines. Scholars and graduate students in the psychology of aging, affective science, and social gerontology will benefit from this over-view and theoretical framework.
Photos provide a literal snapshot of a person in a particular context at a specific moment in time. Previous studies have found that people can accurately categorize others from single photos of their faces along various social dimensions, yet this research typically assumes that one photo of an individual representatively samples other photos of the same individual. Across four studies, we investigated this assumption by testing the consistency of perceptions of social categories (viz. sexual orientation and political affiliation) based on multiple photos of the same individuals. We found that judgments of social categories exceeded chance and significantly correlated across different photo contexts, across variability in targets’ motivations, and across time. These data supplement earlier work showing similar consistency for other types of social judgments. Thus, single face photos can consistently convey some aspects of an individual's appearance.
We are constantly forming impressions about those around us. Social interaction depends on our understanding of interpersonal behavior - assessing one another's personality, emotions, thoughts and feelings, attitudes, deceptiveness, group memberships, and other personal characteristics through facial expressions, body language, voice and spoken language. But how accurate are our impressions and when does such accuracy matter? How is accuracy achieved and are some of us more successful at achieving it than others? This comprehensive overview presents cutting-edge research on this fast-expanding field and will be essential reading for anyone interested in the psychology of interpersonal perception. A wide range of experts in the field explore topics including age and gender effects, psychopathology, culture and ethnicity, workplaces and leadership, clinicians' skills, empathy, meta-perception, and training people to be more accurate in their perceptions of others.
Relying on the Big Two framework (Abele et al., 2016, 2021) and the distinction of agency into the facets of assertiveness and ability, three experimental studies address the hypothesis that assertiveness and ability are influenced differentially by the consequences of success or failure. In Studies 1 and 2, participants had to imagine presenting a product developed by a hospital to an audience while either knowing or not knowing that selling the product could have strong positive consequences for the hospital's budget. They further had to imagine that they had succeeded in positively presenting the product or that they had failed. Study 2 replicated the design with the participants enacting the task for real. Supporting our hypotheses, we consistently found that self-evaluation of assertiveness was higher with both success and knowledge about the economic consequences, whereas self-evaluation of ability was higher with success but without knowledge of economic consequences. These findings support the facet approach of the agency dimension and give hints on how the assertiveness versus ability facets of self-evaluation differ.
Social Hierarchy is one fundamental aspect of social living, structuring interactions in families, teams and entire societies. In this review, we put forward a cultural psychological approach to social hierarchy, positing that rank differences are embedded within larger cultural meaning systems, which shape how higher rank is attained or conferred and how social hierarchy affords behavior and psychology. We then examine manifestations of hierarchy in two cultural meaning systems: Western and East Asian cultures. Accumulating evidence on collective, interpersonal, and individual processes suggests cultural similarities in self-orientation but cultural differences in other-orientation of high-ranking individuals. Such literatures reveal how thought and behavior within social hierarchy and cultural beliefs, values and norms mutually constitute each other. We close with a discussion of how the present review is a stepping stone for future research and of remaining questions to further advance social hierarchy research across cultures.
Despite the profound behavioral consequences that first impressions of trustworthiness have on adult populations, few studies have examined how adults' first impressions of trustworthiness influence behavioral outcomes for children. Using a novel task design, we examined adults' perceptions of children's behavior in ambiguous situations. After a brief presentation of a child's face (high trust or low trust), participants viewed the child's face embedded within an ambiguous scene involving two children (Scene Task) or read a vignette about a misbehavior done by that child (Misbehavior Task). In the Scene Task, participants described what they believed to be happening in each scene; in the Misbehavior Task, participants indicated whether the behavior was done on purpose or by accident. In both tasks, participants also rated the behavior of the target child and indicated whether that child would be a good friend. In Experiment 1, young adults (n = 61) and older adults (n = 57) viewed unaltered face images. In Experiment 2, young adults (N = 59) completed the same tasks while viewing images of child faces morphed toward high-trust and low-trust averages. In both experiments, ambiguous scenes and misbehaviors were interpreted more positively when the target child had a high-trust face versus a low-trust face, with comparable patterns of results for the two age groups. Collectively, our results demonstrate that a child's facial trustworthiness biases how adults interpret children's behavior-a heuristic that may have lasting behavioral consequences for children through a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Numerous attempts to improve diversity by way of changing the hearts of decision makers have fallen short of the desired outcome. One underappreciated factor that contributes to bias resides not in decision makers’ hearts, but instead in their minds. People possess images, or mental representations, for specific roles and professions. Which mental image or representation springs spontaneously to mind depends on the current status quo within a field. Whether or not an individual or groups’ appearance matches visual stereotypes results in perceptually mediated preferences and prejudices, both of which harbor pernicious assumptions about who belongs in a professional setting and why. Leveraging these scientific insights can enact change. Shifting visible exemplars can change people’s mental representations and their heart’s evaluative reactions to others.
First impressions of traits are formed rapidly and nonconsciously, suggesting an automatic process. We examined whether first impressions of trustworthiness are mandatory, another component of automaticity in face processing. In Experiment 1a, participants rated faces displaying subtle happy, subtle angry, and neutral expressions on trustworthiness. Happy faces were rated as more trustworthy than neutral faces; angry faces were rated as less trustworthy. In Experiment 1b, participants learned eight identities, half showing subtle happy and half showing subtle angry expressions. They then rated neutral images of these same identities (plus four novel neutral faces) on trustworthiness. Multilevel modeling analyses showed that identities previously shown with subtle expressions of happiness were rated as more trustworthy than novel identities. There was no effect of previously seen subtle angry expressions on ratings of trustworthiness. Mandatory first impressions based on subtle facial expressions were also reflected in two ratings designed to assess real-world outcomes. Participants indicated that they were more likely to vote for identities that had posed happy expressions and more likely to loan them money. These findings demonstrate that first impressions of trustworthiness based on previously seen subtle happy, but not angry, expressions are mandatory and are likely to have behavioral consequences.
How do top executives’ aesthetic attributes, such as their physical (e.g., attractiveness) and vocal (e.g., voice pitch) features, shape their firms and their own careers? Whereas strategic leadership scholars mostly have focused on top executives’ cognitive, psychological, and affective attributes, researchers increasingly have focused on this research question as well. As a result, a substantial body of research has emerged, as evidenced by the sixty-five empirical studies we located. Our review of the literature indicates that aesthetic attributes are related to executives’ careers and organizational outcomes in important ways, including executive selection and firm strategy. There also appear to be important contingencies, such as other individual differences and cultural factors, that shape these relationships. However, we conclude that there are important theoretical and methodological shortcomings in this literature and that addressing these issues is critical to validating extant findings, establishing more legitimacy, and moving this literature forward.
People use facial information to infer others’ leadership potential across numerous domains; but what forms the basis of these judgements and how much do they matter? Here, we quantitatively reviewed the literature on perceptions of leaders from facial cues to better understand the association between physical appearance and leader outcomes. We used standard random-effects meta-analytic techniques to determine how appearance cues relate to leader perceptions and associated constructs. Appearance cues suggesting the presence of qualities often desired in leaders correlated with leader selection and success (M Z-r =.26, 95% CI [.21,.31]). Larger effect sizes emerged for popularity outcomes (i.e., those based on perceptions) than for performance outcomes (i.e., those based on external measures). These data help to explain how people envision leaders and their characteristics, providing potential insights to why they select and follow particular individuals over others.
A large research literature details the powerful behavioral consequences that a trustworthy appearance can have on adult behavior. Surprisingly, few studies have investigated how these biases operate among children, despite the theoretical importance of understanding when these biases emerge in development. Here, we used an economic trust game to systematically investigate trust behavior in young children (5-8 years), older children (9-12 years), and adults. Participants played the game with child and adult "partners" that varied in emotional expression (mild displays of happiness and anger, and a neutral baseline), which is known to modulate perceived trustworthiness. Strikingly, both groups of children showed adult-like facial appearance biases when trusting others, with no "own-age bias." There were no developmental differences in the magnitude of this effect, which supports adult-like overgeneralization of these transient emotion cues into enduring trait impressions that guide interpersonal behavior from as early as 5 years of age. Irrespective of whether or not they were explicitly directed to do so, all participants modulated their behavior in line with the emotion cues: more generous and trusting with happy partners, followed by neutral, and then angry. These findings speak to the impressive sophistication of children's early social cognition and provide key insights into the causal mechanisms driving trait impressions, suggesting they are not necessarily contingent upon protracted social experience.
People automatically generate first impressions from others' faces, even with limited time and information. Most research on social face evaluation focuses on static morphological features that are embedded "in the face" (e.g., overall average of facial features, masculinity/femininity, cues related to positivity/negativity, etc.). Here, we offer the first investigation of how variability in facial emotion affects social evaluations. Participants evaluated targets that, over time, displayed either high-variability or low-variability distributions of positive (happy) and/or negative (angry/fearful/sad) facial expressions, despite the overall averages of those facial features always being the same across conditions. We found that high-variability led to consistently positive perceptions of authenticity, and thereby, judgments of perceived happiness, trustworthiness, leadership, and team-member desirability. We found these effects were based specifically in variability in emotional displays (not intensity of emotion), and specifically increased the positivity of social judgments (not their extremity). Overall, people do not merely average or summarize over facial expressions to arrive at a judgment, but instead also draw inferences from the variability of those expressions.
This study examined whether positive facial expressions in student identification photographs were connected with a health-relevant behavior: visits to a health care center in the last year for preventive and non-preventive (e.g. illness, injury) purposes. Identification photographs were coded for degree of smile. Smiling participants were more likely to have sought preventive care versus those not smiling in their photographs, but there was no difference in non-preventive (i.e. ill health) visits. This study shows for the first time that smiling in photographs may be related to healthy behavior and complements past work connecting smiling to positive psychosocial and health outcomes.
Facial appearance correlates with leadership, both in terms of who is chosen (leader selection) and how they do (leader success). Leadership theories suggest that exceptional individuals acquire positions as leaders. Exceptional traits can differ between domains, however, and so the qualities valued in leaders in one occupation may not match those valued among leaders in another. To test this, we compared the relationship between facial appearance and leadership across two domains: law firms and mafia families. Perceptions of power correlated with leadership among law executives whereas social skill correlated with leadership in organized crime. Critically, these traits were distinctive within their respective groups. Furthermore, an experimental test showed that the relative frequency of facial traits in a group can render them either an asset or liability. Perceived leadership ability is therefore enhanced by characteristics that appear unique among individuals who satisfy the basic criteria for their group.
Adults automatically infer a person’s social disposition and future behavior based upon the many properties they observe about how they look and sound. The goal of the current study is to explore the developmental origins of this bias. We tested whether 12-month-old infants automatically infer a character’s social disposition (e.g., whether they are likely to ‘help’ or ‘hinder’ another character’s goal) based upon the sounds and visual features those characters display. Infants were habituated to 2 characters, one that possessed more positive properties (e.g., a soft, fluffy appearance, and a happy-sounding laugh) or more negative properties (e.g., a sharp, pointy appearance, and a deep, ominous laugh). During test trials we observed that infants looked longer at events that involved characters engaging in social actions towards another that were inconsistent rather than consistent with the valence of how they looked and sounded during habituation. Two control conditions support the interpretation that infants’ responses were based upon an inferred causal relationship between a character’s features and its disposition rather than on some non-causal associations between the positive and negative valences of the characteristics and actions. Together these studies suggest that infants are biased to connect an agent’s audiovisual features to their social behavior.
Recent research has demonstrated that judgments of Chief Executive Officers' (CEOs') faces predict their firms' financial performance, finding that characteristics associated with higher power (e.g., dominance) predict greater profits. Most of these studies have focused on CEOs of profit-based businesses, where the main criterion for success is financial gain. Here, we examined whether facial appearance might predict measures of success in a sample of CEOs of non-profit organizations (NPOs). Indeed, contrary to findings for the CEOs of profit-based businesses, judgments of leadership and power from the faces of CEOs of NPOs negatively correlated with multiple measures of charitable success (Study 1). Moreover, CEOs of NPOs looked less powerful than the CEOs of profit-based businesses (Study 2) and leadership ratings positively associated with warmth-based traits and NPO success when participants knew the faces belonged to CEOs of NPOs (Study 3). CEOs who look less dominant may therefore achieve greater success in leading NPOs, opposite the relationship found for the CEOs of profit-based companies. Thus, the relationship between facial appearance and leadership success varies by organizational context.
Recent studies have demonstrated that judgments of business leaders’ faces predict their organizations’ financial performance. To date, these predictions have been derived exclusively from the impressions of naïve perceivers. Here, we tested how perceivers’ knowledge and experience in business might relate to their judgments of CEOs’ leadership ability from nonverbal facial cues. In Study 1, business students performed similarly to non-business students when rating faces for leadership ability. Business professionals with many years of experience exhibited significantly lower accuracy than professionals without business experience in Study 2, however. Following previous research demonstrating that experience in a particular domain can ironically reduce the accuracy of individuals’ judgments, our findings suggest that perceivers’ experience in executive business management positions may inhibit them from accurately judging leadership ability from nonverbal information. Domain-specific knowledge may therefore impair the accuracy of first impressions.
Previous studies have found that facial appearance can predict both the selection and performance of leaders. Little is known about the specific facial features responsible for this relationship, however. One possible feature is mouth width, which correlates with the propensity for physical combat in primates and could therefore be linked to one's perceived dominance and achievement of greater social rank. Here, we found that mouth width correlated with leader selection in experimentally standardized (Study 1A) and experimentally manipulated (Study 1B) faces. Applying these findings to real leaders, we observed that mouth width correlated with judgments of CEOs' leadership ability and with a measure of their actual leadership success (i.e., the profitability of their companies; Study 2). Individuals with wider mouths were also more likely to have won U.S. senate, but not gubernatorial, races (Study 3). Mouth width may therefore be a valid cue to leadership selection and success.
The present chapter reviews the relation of a person's power or status to their nonverbal communication. For the power/status dimension, we use the term vertical dimension of social relations to encompass a wide assortment of conceptually related definitions including hierarchical role (preexistent or manipulated), personality dominance, social status, social class, and feelings of power. The following topics in nonverbal communication are reviewed: (1) beliefs and stereotypes about the relation of the vertical dimension to nonverbal behavior, (2) perceptions of verticality based on viewing nonverbal behavior, (3) impact of power-relevant bodily positions on behavior and cognition (embodiment), (4) relation of people's verticality to their nonverbal behavior, (5) accuracy of judging others' verticality, and (6) relation of people's verticality to accuracy in interpreting others' states and traits, and in recalling their verbal or nonverbal behavior. In all domains, the evidence indicated that verticality is related to nonverbal communication though the relations can be complex and inconsistent. Much research remains to be done on mediators as well as moderators, including differences among the different definitions of the verticality construct. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014. All rights are reserved.
Humans rapidly and automatically use facial appearance to attribute personality traits (“trustworthy,” “competent”). To what extent is this face-to-trait attribution learned gradually across development versus early in childhood? Here, we demonstrate that child-adult concordance occurs even when faces should minimize agreement: natural (not computer-generated) adult faces; less developed children’s faces; and perceptually unfamiliar monkey faces. In Study 1, 3- to 12-year-olds and adults selected “nice/mean” faces among pairs with a priori “nice-mean” ratings. Significant cross-age consensus emerged for all three face types. Study 2 replicated this result using an improved procedure in which 44–48 faces appeared in randomized pairs. This converging evidence supports the idea that complex forms of social cognition – allowing perceivers to believe they can derive personality from faces – emerge early in childhood, a finding that calls for new procedures to detect this central facet of cognition earlier in life.
This article presents three studies examining how cross-cultural variation in assumptions about the appropriateness of referencing non-work roles while in work settings create consequential impressions that affect professional outcomes. Study 1 reveals a perceived norm limiting the referencing of non-work roles at work and provides evidence that it is a U.S. norm by showing that awareness of it varies as a function of tenure living in the United States. Studies 2 and 3 examine the implications of the norm for evaluations of job candidates. Study 2 finds that U.S. but not Indian participants negatively evaluate job candidates who endorse non-work role referencing as a strategy to create rapport, and shows that this cultural difference is largest among participants most familiar with norms of professionalism, those with prior recruiting experience. Study 3 finds that corporate job recruiters from the U.S. negatively evaluate candidates who endorse non-work role referencing as a means of building rapport with a potential business partner. This research underlines the importance of navigating initial interactions in culturally appropriate ways to facilitate the development of longer-term collaborations and negotiation success.
We document the link existing between perceived intelligence and perceived beauty. The analysis is based on original survey data computed by Epoll Market Research that provides thorough information on how 3,620 American celebrities are perceived by a representative sample of the American population. These celebrities are prominent people in fields like cinema, sports, music, business, politics, etc. We correlate intelligence scores with scores on eleven available physical attributes linked with physical beauty (attractive, beautiful, charming, classy, cute, exciting, glamorous, handsome, physically fit, sexy, stylish). Results show that being judged classy, charming, or stylish is positively associated with intelligence whereas looking cute, physically fit, or sexy sends a negative signal about cognitive skills.
Differential, structural, and absolute stability of babyfaceness and attractiveness at 5 ages were investigated. Attractiveness had differential stability across the life span. Babyfaceness had differential stability from childhood through the 30s for males and through adolescence for females. Consistent with sexual dimorphisms in facial maturation, males had less differential stability in babyfaceness from childhood to puberty than females. Structural stability of facial appearance, as reflected in the relationship between babyfaceness and attractiveness across the life span, was low, with these qualities positively related for females in childhood and for both sexes in their 30s and 50s but unrelated in puberty and adolescence. Absolute stability of babyfaceness and attractiveness was also low, with mean levels decreasing across the life span. Contrary to cultural stereotypes, age-related decreases in attractiveness were equal for male and female Ss.
Using elements borrowed from psychology, sociology, and history, this article outlines a conceptual framework for the analysis of personality in the life course. It is proposed that the interactional framework toward which personality psychology aspires may be conceived of as a sequence of interactions of personality with age-graded roles and social transitions in historically changing environments. To the extent that one can (a) identify the age-graded role paths in the social structure, (b) select the age-relevant situations in which these roles are enacted, and (c) identify measures relevant to the culture pattern across these age-relevant situations, it should be possible to uncover the coherence of personality—ways of approaching and responding to the world—across time and in diverse situations. Each of these steps is delineated and then illustrated with a longitudinal study of explosive, undercontrolled children. This is not an effort to articulate a theory of personality development but to outline the parameters of social life—temporal and situational—to which personality research should attend. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)
Examined whether physically attractive stimulus persons, both male and female, are (a) assumed to possess more socially desirable personality traits than physically unattractive stimulus persons, and (b) expected to lead better lives (e.g., be more competent husbands and wives and more successful occupationally) than unattractive stimulus persons. Sex of Subject * Sex of Stimulus Person interactions along these dimensions also were investigated. Results with 30 male and 30 female undergraduates indicate a "what is beautiful is good" stereotype along the physical attractiveness dimension with no Sex of Judge * Sex of Stimulus interaction. Implications of such a stereotype on self-concept development and the course of social interaction are discussed.
The relations between infant attractiveness and maternal behavior were examined by observing mothers feeding and playing with their firstborn infants while they were still in the hospital after giving birth (
N = 144) and again when the infants were 3 months of age (
N = 115). The attitudes of the mothers toward their infants were also assessed. Mothers of more attractive infants were more affectionate and playful compared with mothers of less attractive infants. In contrast, the mothers of less attractive infants were more likely to be attentive to other people rather than to their infant and to engage in routine caregiving rather than affectionate behavior. The attitudes of the mothers of less attractive infants were also more negative than those of mothers of more attractive infants, but the number of differences in attitudes was not as great as the behavioral differences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The fact that attractiveness is associated with goodness has dominated the literature on first impressions over the last few decades. However, one situation that has been largely ignored is the recruitment setting. While evidence suggests that attractiveness is an asset, little research has addressed the possible disadvantage of having a disfigured face. In this study, perceptions of personal qualities and job skills were obtained from both students and recruitment personnel in response to a mock job applicant who had either no disfigurement, a facial disfigurement, a physical disability or both. The results indicated a marked negative perception of the applicant with the facial disfigurement but no main effect of a physical disability, for both personal qualities and job skills. In addition, analysis of the recruitment decisions of the students suggested that while the possession of a physical disability significantly reduced the chances of being selected, the possession of a facial disfigurement had a far greater negative impact. Comparison across students and recruiters suggested that recruitment experience did offset this bias somewhat, and the results are discussed in terms of both a theoretical understanding of the reactions to disability and the possibilities for re-education in the workplace.
The effects of litigants' facial appearance on judicial decisions were investigated in 506 cases heard in small claims courts. Replicating previous laboratory studies, both baby-facedness and attractiveness exerted a significant impact on adjudications. As plaintiffs increased in attractiveness, defendants were more likely to lose the case. Also, as defendants increased in baby-facedness, they were more likely to win cases involving intentional actions and less likely to win cases involving negligent actions, although the latter simple effect was not significant. Finally, as defendants increased in facial maturity, they were required to pay larger monetary awards to baby-faced plaintiffs, albeit not to average or mature-faced plaintiffs. This pattern of decisions was interpreted as reflecting assumptions about the psychological attributes of baby-faced versus mature-faced individuals. The effects of the extralegal variables of litigant attractiveness and baby-facedness were sufficiently large to have practical as well as statistical significance, and they were independent of each other and the age of the litigants as well as of legal variables predicting adjudications.
Based on social–functional accounts of emotion, we conducted two studies examining whether the degree to which people smiled
in photographs predicts the likelihood of divorce. Along with other theorists, we posited that smiling behavior in photographs
is potentially indicative of underlying emotional dispositions that have direct and indirect life consequences. In the first
study, we examined participants’ positive expressive behavior in college yearbook photos and in Study 2 we examined a variety
of participants’ photos from childhood through early adulthood. In both studies, divorce was predicted by the degree to which
subjects smiled in their photos.
The authors used connectionist modeling to extend previous research on emotion overgeneralization effects. Study 1 demonstrated that neutral expression male faces objectively resemble angry expressions more than female faces do, female faces objectively resemble surprise expressions more than male faces do, White faces objectively resemble angry expressions more than Black or Korean faces do, and Black faces objectively resemble happy and surprise expressions more than White faces do. Study 2 demonstrated that objective resemblance to emotion expressions influences trait impressions even when statistically controlling possible confounding influences of attractiveness and babyfaceness. It further demonstrated that emotion overgeneralization is moderated by face race and that racial differences in emotion resemblance contribute to White perceivers' stereotypes of Blacks and Asians. These results suggest that intergroup relations may be strained not only by cultural stereotypes but also by adaptive responses to emotion expressions that are overgeneralized to groups whose faces subtly resemble particular emotions.
Previous work has shown that individuals agree across cultures on the traits that they infer from faces. Previous work has also shown that inferences from faces can be predictive of important outcomes within cultures. The current research merges these two lines of work. In a series of cross-cultural studies, the authors asked American and Japanese participants to provide naïve inferences of traits from the faces of U.S. political candidates (Studies 1 and 3) and Japanese political candidates (Studies 2 and 4). Perceivers showed high agreement in their ratings of the faces, regardless of culture, and both sets of judgments were predictive of an important ecological outcome (the percentage of votes that each candidate received in the actual election). The traits predicting electoral success differed, however, depending on the targets' culture. Thus, when American and Japanese participants were asked to provide explicit inferences of how likely each candidate would be to win an election (Studies 3-4), judgments were predictive only for same-culture candidates. Attempts to infer the electoral success for the foreign culture showed evidence of self-projection. Therefore, perceivers can reliably infer predictive information from faces but require knowledge about the target's culture to make these predictions accurately.
This study attempted to determine whether people who live with each other for a long period of time grow physically similar in their facial features. Photographs of couples when they were first married and 25 years later were judged for physical similarity and for the likelihood that they were married. The results showed that there is indeed an increase in apparent similarity after 25 years of cohabitation. Moreover, increase in resemblance was associated with greater reported marital happiness. Among the explanations of this phenomenon that were examined, one based on a theory of emotional efference emerged as promising. This theory proposes that emotional processes produce vascular changes that are, in part, regulated by facial musculature. The facial muscles are said to act as ligatures on veins and arteries, and they thereby are able to divert blood from, or direct blood to, the brain. An implication of the vascular theory of emotional efference is that habitual use of facial musculature may permanently affect the physical features of the face. The implication holds further that two people who live with each other for a longer period of time, by virtue of repeated empathic mimicry, would grow physically similar in their facial features. Kin resemblance, therefore, may not be simply a matter of common genes but also a matter of prolonged social contact.
A. L.
Dear A. L.: As far as physical appearance is concerned, likes seem to attract. Some experts feel that this resemblance may partly be explained by the fact that couples who've lived together for some time usually eat the same diet and share the same habits.
The Joyce Brothers Column
April 1985
This study explored the relationship between emotion-based personality traits and expressive patterns in older subjects. Specifically, the study sought to demonstrate (a) that individuals have emotion expression biases, as revealed by structural and dynamic properties of the face, and (b) that there is a link between facial characteristics (as indexed by the judgments of trained and naive raters) and personality traits. An encoding/decoding paradigm was used; 30 adult, naive judges rated five emotion-pose photographs for each of 14 older subjects who had also completed a personality trait measure. Results indicated that individuals vary in their ability to accurately encode emotion states and that these patterns are linked to personality traits in an affect-specific way. The results are discussed within the framework of Darwinian theory and Plutchik's model of personality.
This article presents findings about continuities in personality development that have been uncovered in the Dunedin study, an investigation of a cohort of children studied from age 3 to 21. At age 3, children were classified into temperament groups on the basis of observations of their behavior. In young adulthood, data were collected from study members themselves, from people who knew them well, and from official records. Undercontrolled 3-year-olds grew up to be impulsive, unreliable, and antisocial, and had more conflict with members of their social networks and in their work. Inhibited 3-year-olds were more likely to be unassertive and depressed and had fewer sources of social support. Early appearing temperamental differences have a pervasive influence on life-course development and offer clues about personality structure, interpersonal relations, psychopathology, and crime in adulthood.
To test hypotheses about positive emotion, the authors examined the relationship of positive emotional expression in women's college pictures to personality, observer ratings, and life outcomes. Consistent with the notion that positive emotions help build personal resources, positive emotional expression correlated with the self-reported personality traits of affiliation, competence, and low negative emotionality across adulthood and predicted changes in competence and negative emotionality. Observers rated women displaying more positive emotion more favorably on several personality dimensions and expected interactions with them to be more rewarding; thus, demonstrating the beneficial social consequences of positive emotions. Finally, positive emotional expression predicted favorable outcomes in marriage and personal well-being up to 30 years later. Controlling for physical attractiveness and social desirability had little impact on these findings.
Research into social inequalities in health has tended to focus on low socioeconomic status in adulthood. We aimed to test the hypothesis that children's experience of socioeconomic disadvantage is associated with a wide range of health risk factors and outcomes in adult life.
We studied an unselected cohort of 1000 children (born in New Zealand during 1972-73) who had been assessed at birth and ages 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 15 years. At age 26 years, we assessed these individuals for health outcomes including body-mass index, waist:hip ratio, blood pressure, cardiorespiratory fitness, dental caries, plaque scores, gingival bleeding, periodontal disease, major depression, and tobacco and alcohol dependence, and tested for associations between these variables and childhood and adult socioeconomic status.
Compared with those from high socioeconomic status backgrounds, children who grew up in low socioeconomic status families had poorer cardiovascular health. Significant differences were also found on all dental health measures, with a threefold increase in adult periodontal disease (31.1% vs 11.9%) and caries level (32.2% vs 9.9%) in low versus high childhood socioeconomic status groups. Substance abuse resulting in clinical dependence was related in a similar way to childhood socioeconomic status (eg, 21.5% vs 12.1% for adult alcohol dependence). The longitudinal associations could not be attributed to life-course continuity of low socioeconomic status, and upward mobility did not mitigate or reverse the adverse effects of low childhood socioeconomic status on adult health.
Protecting children against the effects of socioeconomic adversity could reduce the burden of disease experienced by adults. These findings provide strong impetus for policy makers, practitioners, and researchers to direct energy and resources towards childhood as a way of improving population health.
Using prospective data from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study birth cohort, the authors found that adolescents with low self-esteem had poorer mental and physical health, worse economic prospects, and higher levels of criminal behavior during adulthood, compared with adolescents with high self-esteem. The long-term consequences of self-esteem could not be explained by adolescent depression, gender, or socioeconomic status. Moreover, the findings held when the outcome variables were assessed using objective measures and informant reports; therefore, the findings cannot be explained by shared method variance in self-report data. The findings suggest that low self-esteem during adolescence predicts negative real-world consequences during adulthood.
To test the hypothesis that children who occupy peripheral or isolated roles in their peer groups (isolated children) are at risk of poor adult health.
Longitudinal study of an entire birth cohort.
Dunedin, New Zealand.
A total of 1037 children who were followed up from birth to age 26 years.
Measurement of social isolation in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
When study members were 26 years old, we measured adult cardiovascular multifactorial risk status (overweight, elevated blood pressure, elevated total cholesterol level, low high-density lipoprotein level, elevated glycated hemoglobin concentration, and low maximum oxygen consumption).
Socially isolated children were at significant risk of poor adult health compared with nonisolated children (risk ratio, 1.37; 95% confidence interval, 1.17-1.61). This association was independent of other well-established childhood risk factors for poor adult health (low childhood socioeconomic status, low childhood IQ, childhood overweight), was not accounted for by health-damaging behaviors (lack of exercise, smoking, alcohol misuse), and was not attributable to greater exposure to stressful life events. In addition, longitudinal findings showed that chronic social isolation across multiple developmental periods had a cumulative, dose-response relationship to poor adult health (risk ratio, 2.58; 95% confidence interval, 1.46-4.56).
Longitudinal findings about children followed up to adulthood suggest that social isolation has persistent and cumulative detrimental effects on adult health. The findings underscore the usefulness of a life-course approach to health research, by focusing attention on the effect of the timing of psychosocial risk factors in relation to adult health.
Stress in early life has been associated with insufficient glucocorticoid signaling in adulthood, possibly affecting inflammation processes. Childhood maltreatment has been linked to increased risk of adult disease with potential inflammatory origin. However, the impact of early life stress on adult inflammation is not known in humans. We tested the life-course association between childhood maltreatment and adult inflammation in a birth cohort followed to age 32 years as part of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study. Regression models were used to estimate the effect of maltreatment on inflammation, adjusting for co-occurring risk factors and potential mediating variables. Maltreated children showed a significant and graded increase in the risk for clinically relevant C-reactive protein levels 20 years later, in adulthood [risk ratio (RR) = 1.80, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.26–2.58]. The effect of childhood maltreatment on adult inflammation was independent of the influence of co-occurring early life risks (RR = 1.58, 95% CI = 1.08–2.31), stress in adulthood (RR = 1.64, 95% CI = 1.12–2.39), and adult health and health behavior (RR = 1.76, 95% CI = 1.23–2.51). More than 10% of cases of low-grade inflammation in the population, as indexed by high C-reactive protein, may be attributable to childhood maltreatment. The association between maltreatment and adult inflammation also generalizes to fibrinogen and white blood cell count. Childhood maltreatment is a previously undescribed, independent, and preventable risk factor for inflammation in adulthood. Inflammation may be an important developmental mediator linking adverse experiences in early life to poor adult health.
• C-reactive protein
• development
• epidemiology
• risk factor
• stress
The present research tested the relations between a battery of background factors and counterproductive work behaviors in a 23-year longitudinal study of young adults (N = 930). Background information, such as diagnosed adolescent conduct disorder, criminal conviction records, intelligence, and personality traits, was assessed before participants entered the labor force. These background factors were combined with work conditions at age 26 to predict counterproductive work behaviors at age 26. The results showed that people diagnosed with childhood conduct disorder were more prone to commit counterproductive work behaviors in young adulthood and that these associations were partially mediated by personality traits measured at age 18. Contrary to expectations, criminal convictions that occurred prior to entering the workforce were unrelated to counterproductive work behaviors. Job conditions and personality traits had independent effects on counterproductive work behaviors, above and beyond background factors.
This article concerns the real-world importance of leadership for the success or failure of organizations and social institutions. The authors propose conceptualizing leadership and evaluating leaders in terms of the performance of the team or organization for which they are responsible. The authors next offer a taxonomy of the dependent variables used as criteria in leadership studies. A review of research using this taxonomy suggests that the vast empirical literature on leadership may tell us more about the success of individual managerial careers than the success of these people in leading groups, teams, and organizations. The authors then summarize the evidence showing that leaders do indeed affect the performance of organizations—for better or for worse—and conclude by describing the mechanisms through which they do so.
This article presents findings about continuities in personality development that have been uncovered in the Dunedin study, an investigation of a cohort of children studied from age 3 to 21. At age 3, children were classified into temperament groups on the basis of observations of their behavior. In young adulthood, data were collected from study members themselves, from people who knew them well, and from official records. Undercontrolled 3-year-olds grew up to be impulsive, unreliable, and antisocial, and had more conflict with members of their social networks and in their work. Inhibited 3-year-olds were more likely to be unassertive and depressed and had fewer sources of social support. Early appearing temperamental differences have a pervasive influence on life-course development and offer clues about personality structure, interpersonal relations, psychopathology, and crime in adulthood.
Facial dominance of West Point cadets, measured from their graduation portraits, is known to be related to cadets' ranks at
the military academy, but it has been reported to be unrelated to their ranks in later career (Mazur, Mazur & Keating 1984).
With improved methods of data collection and analysis, we show that cadets' facial dominance, while still unrelated to their
ranks at midcareer, is related to promotions in late career, 20 or more years after the portraits were taken. These results
suggest that the absence of physical features from current models of status attainment is a serious omission.
Rosenthal and Jacobson found that a teacher's expectations about a child's behavior strongly influence his actual behavior. Generally, teachers form their first impressions of children, and thus develop their expectations for them, from two sources of information--the children's school record and their physical appearance. In this experiment, teachers were given objective information, presumably about a child's scholastic and social potential, accompanied by a photograph of an attractive or an unattractive boy or girl. It was found that the child's attractiveness was significantly associated with the teacher's expectations about how intelligent the child was, how interested in education his parents were, how far he was likely to progress in school, and how popular he would be with his peers.
Using archival data, the relationship of appearance to personality was investigated from childhood to age 60. Lagged effects of appearance on personality and vice versa, as well as accuracy of appearance stereotypes, were assessed. For men, lagged effects of attractiveness on personality were consistent with a self fulfilling prophecy; for adolescent boys, lagged effects of babyfaceness on personality were consistent with a self-defeating prophecy; for women, lagged effects of personality on attractiveness were consistent with a Dorian Gray effect, whereby early personality produces a congruent later appearance. There was no evidence for accuracy of the baby-face stereotype, which was significantly inaccurate for adolescent boys. Accuracy of the attractiveness stereotype required effects of a stable earlier appearance on later personality or a stable earlier personality on later appearance.
This review provides an account of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) after 35 years of longitudinal research. Findings from recent 20-year follow-ups from three cohorts, plus 5- or 10-year findings from all five SMPY cohorts (totaling more than 5,000 participants), are presented. SMPY has devoted particular attention to uncovering personal antecedents necessary for the development of exceptional math-science careers and to developing educational interventions to facilitate learning among intellectually precocious youth. Along with mathematical gifts, high levels of spatial ability, investigative interests, and theoretical values form a particularly promising aptitude complex indicative of potential for developing scientific expertise and of sustained commitment to scientific pursuits. Special educational opportunities, however, can markedly enhance the development of talent. Moreover, extraordinary scientific accomplishments require extraordinary commitment both in and outside of school. The theory of work adjustment (TWA) is useful in conceptualizing talent identification and development and bridging interconnections among educational, counseling, and industrial psychology. The lens of TWA can clarify how some sex differences emerge in educational settings and the world of work. For example, in the SMPY cohorts, although more mathematically precocious males than females entered math-science careers, this does not necessarily imply a loss of talent because the women secured similar proportions of advanced degrees and high-level careers in areas more correspondent with the multidimensionality of their ability-preference pattern (e.g., administration, law, medicine, and the social sciences). By their mid-30s, the men and women appeared to be happy with their life choices and viewed themselves as equally successful (and objective measures support these subjective impressions). Given the ever-increasing importance of quantitative and scientific reasoning skills in modern cultures, when mathematically gifted individuals choose to pursue careers outside engineering and the physical sciences, it should be seen as a contribution to society, not a loss of talent.
© 2006 Association for Psychological Science.
Do we read character in faces? What information do faces actually provide? Why do we associate certain facial qualities with particular character traits? What are the social and psychological consequences of reading character in faces? Zebrowitz unmasks the face and provides the first systematic, scientific account of our tendency to judge people by their appearance. Offering an in-depth analysis of two appearance qualities that influence our impressions of others, babyfaceness" and attractiveness", and an account of these impressions, Zebrowitz has written an accessible and valuable book for professionals and general readers alike.The assumption that people's faces provide a window to their inner nature has a long and distinguished history, eloquently expressed in the works of ancient philosophers, like Aristotle, and great writers, like Shakespeare. Zebrowitz examines this assumption, focusing on four central points. She shows that facial appearance, particularly babyfaceness and attractiveness, has a strong impact on how we perceive an individual's character traits and on social outcomes in the workplace, in the criminal justice system, and in other settings. She proposes that facial stereotypes derive from evolutionarily adaptive reactions to useful information that faces can provide. She assesses the accuracy of facial stereotypes in light of plausible links between appearance and character. Finally, Zebrowitz suggests ways to counteract the consequences of reading faces.
Two archival studies examined the impact of people's appearance on the status and type of civilian and military jobs they hold. Study 1 found that, although appearance was not related to job status, taller men had higher incomes. Additionally, appearance was significantly related to the type of jobs people held. Attractive women and tall men held jobs requiring traits more consistent with the attractiveness halo, while babyfaced women and short men held jobs more consistent with the babyface stereotype. These effects remained after controlling for job-relevant personality and educational variables, suggesting an unjustified bias toward people with certain appearances. Study 2 found that heavier men had lower job status, as reflected in military rank attainment. However, this relationship was eliminated when controlling for intelligence and dependability. Also, babyfaced men achieved higher status through being marginally more likely to win a military award. This unexpected effect was attributed to the contrast between heroic actions and the babyface stereotype. Finally, appearance affected the type of military experience men had. Heavier men were more likely to be in situations involving gunfire or casualties. These studies make an important contribution by extending laboratory findings to the real world, exploring the effects of appearance on job type as well as status, and providing evidence that appearance effects are not solely due to covariation with bona fide job qualifications.
In 1965 the authors conducted an experiment in a public elementary school, telling teachers that certain children could be expected to be “growth spurters,” based on the students' results on the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition. In point of fact, the test was nonexistent and those children designated as “spurters” were chosen at random. What Rosenthal and Jacobson hoped to determine by this experiment was the degree (if any) to which changes in teacher expectation produce changes in student achievement.
Using elements borrowed from psychology, sociology, and history, this article outlines a conceptual framework for the analysis of personality in the life course. It is proposed that the interactional framework toward which personality psychology aspires may be conceived of as a sequence of interactions of personality with age-graded roles and social transitions in historically changing environments. To the extent that one can (a) identify the age-graded role paths in the social structure, (b) select the age-relevant situations in which these roles are enacted, and (c) identify measures relevant to the culture pattern across these age-relevant situations, it should be possible to uncover the coherence of personality--ways of approaching and responding to the world--across time and in diverse situations. Each of these steps is delineated and then illustrated with a longitudinal study of explosive, undercontrolled children. This is not an effort to articulate a theory of personality development but to outline the parameters of social life--temporal and situational--to which personality research should attend.
Differential, structural, and absolute stability of babyfaceness and attractiveness at 5 ages were investigated. Attractiveness had differential stability across the life span. Babyfaceness had differential stability from childhood through the 30s for males and through adolescence for females. Consistent with sexual dimorphisms in facial maturation, males had less differential stability in babyfaceness from childhood to puberty than females. Structural stability of facial appearance, as reflected in the relationship between babyfaceness and attractiveness across the life span, was low, with these qualities positively related for females in childhood and for both sexes in their 30s and 50s but unrelated in puberty and adolescence. Absolute stability of babyfaceness and attractiveness was also low, with mean levels decreasing across the life span. Contrary to cultural stereotypes, age-related decreases in attractiveness were equal for male and female Ss.
We observed 1,000 3-year-old children who exhibited five temperament types: Undercontrolled, Inhibited, Confident, Reserved, and Well-adjusted. Twenty-three years later, we reexamined 96% of the children as adults, using multiple methods of comprehensive personality assessment, including both self- and informant-reports. These longitudinal data provide the longest and strongest evidence to date that children's early-emerging behavioral styles can foretell their characteristic behaviors, thoughts, and feelings as adults, pointing to the foundations of the human personality in the early years of life.
Pygmalion in the classroom: Teacher expectations and pupils' intellectual development
- R Rosenthal
- L Jacobsen
Rosenthal, R., & Jacobsen, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom:
Teacher expectations and pupils' intellectual development. New
York, NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Which CEO characteristics and abilities matter? Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Financial Association
- S N Kaplan
- M M Klebanov
- M Sorensen
Kaplan, S. N., Klebanov, M. M., & Sorensen, M. (2008, July). Which
CEO characteristics and abilities matter? Paper presented at the
annual meeting of the American Financial Association, New
Orleans, LA.