Whoever said not to judge a book by its cover may be in for a wake-up call; it turns out that split-second judgments made about strangers based solely on their faces may contain a certain degree of accuracy.
According to a study to be released in the February issue of the journal Psychological Science, there is a positive correlation between the profit of a CEO's company and qualities such as dominance and competence seen in his face.
The study was authored by Tufts graduate student Nick Rule and Professor of Psychology Nalini Ambady, who administered the study by showing students 50 headshots of CEOs whose companies were on the "Fortune 500" listing for 2006. After cropping the photos and converting them to grayscale, the psychologists asked participants to either rate the faces for certain traits - competence, dominance, likeability, trustworthiness and facial maturity - or to make a more general assessment of each person's leadership ability.
The ratings of specific traits and of leadership were made on a seven-point scale that included measures ranging from "not at all competent" to "very competent."
Rule and Ambady found that na've or uninformed personality evaluations made on the basis of a person's face might not be so na've after all.
When the qualities of competence, dominance and facial maturity were loaded together as a measure of power, high assessments of this grouping of traits corresponded with larger profits for the CEO's company.
"What we ended up finding ultimately was that how powerful they were seen - the composite of competence, dominance and maturity - predicted how much profit their companies made," Rule said.
Rule and Ambady also discovered a positive correlation between the financial success of a CEO's company and his perceived leadership abilities. High evaluations of leadership, however, did not prove to be related to high evaluations of traits that measured power.
The study controlled for certain variables such as attractiveness, emotional expressiveness and age - which are all known to affect perception of personality - within a sample of white males.
This allowed the researchers to systematically determine the relationship between the traits associated with power and financial success.
"It's not just that we think that better-looking people are better CEOs because they're better at everything," Rule said.
It seems, according to the study, that there is something about power and leadership that is clearly expressed through the face of a stranger.
"What we argue is that it is something that's communicated in a person's face that people are able to pick up on and reliably judge," Ambady said.
What isn't so clear is exactly why the faces of successful CEOs convey qualities of power and of strong leadership.
It might be that people with such facial features rise more easily up the corporate ladder, or that the best CEOs have somehow acquired these traits as their careers progressed.
"It's correlational, so we can't break down causal mechanisms," Ambady said.
What is unique about this particular study is that it links uninformed first impressions with an objective measure: financial success.
Previous work has typically focused on more subjective outcomes.
In the 1990s, Ambady conducted a study in which participants were found to accurately predict the end-of-semester evaluation of different teachers after having been exposed to only brief clips of the teacher.
Another noteworthy aspect of the study is the correlation it established between characteristics of a CEO and the performance of the company as a whole.
"There has been a lot of work in management and business that's sort of tried to relate how much of an influence a CEO has on how well a company does. None of those studies have found any relationship so far," Rule said.
These earlier studies typically used people close to the CEO as participants, asking them to rate the CEO on a number of traits. Rule suggested that in these cases, familiarity might have bred subjective inaccuracy, as businessmen within the CEO's circle were unable to pick up on characteristics of the man in charge.
"So it could be that na've raters are more objective in a sense. So that's allowing them to sort of make a more accurate judgment in this case," Rule said.
Ambady's lab is currently trying to investigate how the study might apply to other fields.
"There are some domains in which people are not accurate, so what distinguishes those from where they are accurate?" Ambady said. "What are the different features or factors that play into that?"
