Core self-evaluations mediate the association between leaders' facial appearance and their professional success: Adults' and children's perceptions

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.     

Identifying Mental Disorder from the Faces of Women with Borderline Personality Disorder

Although appearance-based cues can help to diagnose physical illness, visual manifestations of mental disorder may be more elusive. Here, we investigated whether individuals could distinguish women with a serious mental disorder (borderline personality disorder) from demographically- and IQ-matched non-psychiatric controls. Participants rated mentally ill targets as more likely to have a mental disorder from photos more accurately than chance, despite not believing that such judgments were possible. The configuration of facial cues played an important role in these judgments, as interfering with the spatial relationships between facial features reduced participants’ accuracy to chance guessing. Further investigation showed similar results when participants rated the targets for specific mental disorders (borderline personality disorder, major depressive disorder) and rated the mentally ill targets as more depressed, angry, anxious, disgusted, emotionally unstable, distressed, and less happy. Moreover, the depression ratings significantly correlated with the targets’ actual depressive symptoms. Thus, individuals may be able to infer aspects of mental disorder from minimal facial cues.     

Reply to Jeff Goodwin

Theory and Society -     

Review Essay: McTheory

Sociological Forum -     

Making a (False) Impression: The Role of Business Experience in First Impressions of CEO Leadership Ability

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.     

Some New Regression Methods for Predictive and Construct Validation

Social Indicators Research -     

Perceptions of charisma from thin slices of behavior predict leadership prototypicality judgments

Signaling theory suggests that people use cues transmitted by leaders to form impressions of charisma but the validity of these impressions remains unexplored. Here, we examined whether perceptions of charisma from thin slices of nonverbal behavior relate to inferences based on more information. We tested whether ratings of charisma from 5-, 15-, and 30-s clips (with no audio) of speakers delivering a message predicted evaluations of vision articulation and leadership prototypicality made from 60-s multimedia clips (with audio). The results indicated that thin-slice charisma judgments predicted the criterion scores for leadership prototypicality but not vision articulation from all of the 5-, 15-, and 30-s silent clips. The current data therefore suggest that thin slices of charisma can be valid indicators of leadership.