Nicholas O. Rule

The Face of Success Inferences From Chief Executive Officers' Appearance Predict Company Profits

First impressions are powerful and rich sources of information about other people, and studies have demonstrated that they predict performance in numerous domains, such as teaching (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1993) and electoral success (Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, & Hall, 2005). Much of this work, however, has employed outcome variables that are subjective. For example, in the study of teacher effectiveness, both the predictor (naive observers’ ratings) and the outcome (teaching evaluations) were based on subjective opinions. Similarly, electoral success is based on voters’ impressions of candidates, which are also responsible for which candidates are elected. In the current study, we examined the relation between a subjective predictor and an objective performance outcome: Are impressions of chief executive officers (CEOs) related to the performance of their companies? Despite the ubiquitous perception of the CEO as the embodiment of a company, there is no clear evidence of any relation betweenCEOs’ personalities and their companies’success (Ranft, Zinko, Ferris, & Buckley, 2006). Although some studies show that mediating factors, such as environmental context, can link factors like CEOs’ charisma to companies’ performance, no direct relation between CEOs’ personalities and companies’ success has been found (Agle, Nagarajan, Sonnenfeld, & Srinivasan, 2006; Tosi, Misangyi, Fanelli, Waldman, & Yammarino, 2004). Previous research, however, has shown that personality traits associated with the evaluation of leadership overlap with traits that can be judged reliably from the face. These traits include competence, likeability, and trustworthiness (Todorov et al., 2005) and dominance (Hess, Adams, & Kleck, 2005). Another facial feature related to judgments of leadership is facial maturity (Zebrowitz & Montepare, 2005). Are these variables that can be gauged from facial information also associated with leaders’ success and performance? To answer this question, we asked participants to make naive personality judgments from the photographs of the CEOs from the 25 highest and 25 lowest ranked companies of the Fortune1,000 and examinedwhether these judgments related to measures of the companies’ financial success.

Will a category cue attract you? Motor output reveals dynamic competition across person construal.

People use social categories to perceive others, extracting category cues to glean membership. Growing evidence for continuous dynamics in real-time cognition suggests, contrary to prevailing social psychological accounts, that person construal may involve dynamic competition between simultaneously active representations. To test this, the authors examined social categorization in real-time by streaming the x, y coordinates of hand movements as participants categorized typical and atypical faces by sex. Though judgments of atypical targets were largely accurate, online motor output exhibited a continuous spatial attraction toward the opposite sex category, indicating dynamic competition between multiple social category alternatives. The authors offer a dynamic continuity account of social categorization and provide converging evidence across categorizations of real male and female faces (containing a typical or an atypical sex-specifying cue) and categorizations of computer-generated male and female faces (with subtly morphed sex-typical or sex-atypical features). In 3 studies, online motor output revealed continuous dynamics underlying person construal, in which multiple simultaneously and partially active category representations gradually cascade into social categorical judgments. Such evidence is challenging for discrete stage-based accounts.

Sexual Orientation Perception Involves Gendered Facial Cues

Perceivers can accurately judge a face’s sexual orientation, but the perceptual mechanisms mediating this remain obscure. The authors hypothesized that stereotypes casting gays and lesbians as gender “inverts,” in cultural circulation for a century and a half, lead perceivers to use gendered facial cues to infer sexual orientation. Using computer-generated faces, Study 1 showed that as two facial dimensions (shape and texture) became more gender inverted, targets were more likely to be judged as gay or lesbian. Study 2 showed that real faces appearing more gender inverted were more likely to be judged as gay or lesbian. Furthermore, the stereotypic use of gendered cues influenced the accurate judgment of sexual orientation. Although using gendered cues increased the accuracy of sexual orientation judgments overall, Study 3 showed that judgments were reliably mistaken for targets that countered stereotypes. Together, the findings demonstrate that perceivers utilize gendered facial cues to glean another’s sexual orientation, and this influences the accuracy or error of judgments.

Us and them : Memory advantages in perceptually ambiguous groups

Ingroup advantages and outgroup deficits in perception and memory are well-established in research on race, gender, and other ostensibly identifiable social categories. The present study extended this research to a social category that is not as perceptually apparent: male sexual orientation. Consistent with hypotheses, an interaction of participant sexual orientation and image sexual orientation revealed an ingroup enhancement and outgroup deficit for memory of faces that participants perceived—both accurately and inaccurately—as belonging to either their ingroup or outgroup in a subsequent task. Additionally, parallel effects were found for the accurate identification of sexual orientation—a finding consistent with previous literature. The present data highlight the importance of social categorization for subsequent memory and suggest that the underlying cognitive machinery responsible for the recognition of groups may be co-opted for other relevant social applications.

Accuracy in Categorizing Perceptually Ambiguous Groups A Review and Meta-Analysis

Since the 1940s, social psychologists have conducted research testing whether it is possible to accurately identify members of perceptually ambiguous groups. This study quantitatively reviews the research on the perception of ambiguous groups to better understand the human capacity to accurately identify others based on very subtle nonverbal cues. Standard random-effects meta-analytic techniques were used to examine the distinctions between different target groups in terms of their identifiability, as well as to compare rates of accuracy across perceptual modalities (e.g., photographs, audio, video) and other study design differences. Overall, the accuracy of identifying targets was significantly better than chance guessing (i.e., 64.5%). Furthermore, stimulus modality was found to be a moderator of accuracy. Other moderators (e.g., time of exposure, analytic approach) were identified and examined. These data help to document and characterize broad trends in the proliferating and expanding study of the perception and categorization of ambiguous social groups.

The neural origins of superficial and individuated judgments about ingroup and outgroup members.

We often form impressions of others based on superficial information, such as a mere glimpse of their face. Given the opportunity to get to know someone, however, our judgments are allowed to become more individuated. The neural origins of these two types of social judgment remain unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to dissociate the neural mechanisms underlying superficial and individuated judgments. Given behavioral evidence demonstrating impairments in individuating others outside ones racial group, we additionally examined whether these neural mechanisms are race‐selective. Superficial judgments recruited the amygdala. Individuated judgments engaged a cortical network implicated in mentalizing and theory of mind. One component of this mentalizing network showed selectivity to individuated judgments, but exclusively for targets of ones own race. The findings reveal the distinct—and race‐selective—neural bases of our everyday superficial and individuated judgments of others. Hum Brain Mapp, 2010.

The Neural Basis of Categorical Face Perception: Graded Representations of Face Gender in Fusiform and Orbitofrontal Cortices

Face gender, like many other things, is perceived categorically: Subjective perceptions are distorted toward the categories, male or female, and the objective gradiency inherent across faces is partially lost. The neural basis of such categorical face perception remains virtually unknown. Participants passively viewed faces whose sexually dimorphic content was morphed monotonically from male to female while neural activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjective perceptions revealed strong nonlinearity despite monotonic linear changes in face gender, consistent with categorical perception. Neuroimaging results indicated that the lateral fusiform gyrus, bilaterally, and the fusiform face area linearly encoded graded parameters of objective face gender, but these regions correlated substantially less with subjective perceptions (which were nonlinear and affected by categorical perception effects). Such subjective perceptions, however, were represented in the orbitofrontal cortex, but this region correlated substantially less with objective parameters. The attention-independent graded representations of face gender in fusiform and orbitofrontal cortices reveal how objective face parameters are encoded and transformed into subjective categorically warped perceptions in the human brain.

Facial Trustworthiness Predicts Extreme Criminal-Sentencing Outcomes

Untrustworthy faces incur negative judgments across numerous domains. Existing work in this area has focused on situations in which the target’s trustworthiness is relevant to the judgment (e.g., criminal verdicts and economic games). Yet in the present studies, we found that people also overgeneralized trustworthiness in criminal-sentencing decisions when trustworthiness should not be judicially relevant, and they did so even for the most extreme sentencing decision: condemning someone to death. In Study 1, we found that perceptions of untrustworthiness predicted death sentences (vs. life sentences) for convicted murderers in Florida (N = 742). Moreover, in Study 2, we found that the link between trustworthiness and the death sentence occurred even when participants viewed innocent people who had been exonerated after originally being sentenced to death. These results highlight the power of facial appearance to prejudice perceivers and affect life outcomes even to the point of execution, which suggests an alarming bias in the criminal-justice system.

Ambiguous Group Membership Is Extracted Automatically From Faces

To economize the demands of person perception, individuals quickly and accurately categorize others into groups (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). Indeed, for groups with salient perceptual markers (e.g., sex, age, race), category activation is deemed to be an unavoidable consequence of the person-perception process (Bargh, 1999; Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). But what about social groups with less obvious physical cues, do they also trigger automatic person categorization? Recent data hint that this may, indeed, be the case. Take, for example, male sexual orientation. Although the cues to male sexual orientation are ostensibly ambiguous (yielding categorization accuracy of approximately 60-70% against a chance guessing rate of 50%), differences between gay and straight men can be judged significantly better than chance following very brief exposure to a target (i.e., 50 ms; Rule & Ambady, 2008) and can modulate incidental memory for previously encountered faces (Rule, Ambady, Adams, & Macrae, 2007). What these findings suggest is that, like sex, age, and race, information pertaining to male sexual orientation may be extracted automatically from faces (see Rule, Ambady, Adams, & Macrae, 2008). To explore this possibility, we employed a lexical decision task in which participants responded to gay and straight verbal associates after the presentation of facial primes. If exposure to a face is sufficient to trigger category activation (i.e., information pertaining to sexual orientation), performance should be facilitated on prime-congruent trials.

Tough and Tender Embodied Categorization of Gender

Emerging evidence has shown that human thought can be embodied within physical sensations and actions. Indeed, abstract concepts such as morality, time, and interpersonal warmth can be based on metaphors that are grounded in bodily experiences (e.g., physical temperature can signal interpersonal warmth). We hypothesized that social-category knowledge is similarly embodied, and we tested this hypothesis by examining a sensory metaphor related to categorical judgments of gender. We chose the dimension of “toughness” (ranging from tough to tender), which is often used to characterize differences between males and females. Across two studies, the proprioceptive experience of toughness (vs. tenderness) was manipulated as participants categorized sex-ambiguous faces as male or female. Two different manipulations of proprioceptive toughness predictably biased the categorization of faces toward “male.” These findings suggest that social-category knowledge is at least partially embodied.