A face for all seasons: Searching for context-specific leadership traits and discovering a general preference for perceived health

Abstract

Previous research indicates that followers tend to contingently match particular leader qualities to evolutionarily consistent situations requiring collective action (i.e., context-specific cognitive leadership prototypes) and information processing undergoes categorization which ranks certain qualities as first-order context-general and others as second-order context-specific. To further investigate this contingent categorization phenomenon we examined the “attractiveness halo”—a first-order facial cue which significantly biases leadership preferences. While controlling for facial attractiveness, we independently manipulated the underlying facial cues of health and intelligence and then primed participants with four distinct organizational dynamics requiring leadership (i.e., competition vs. cooperation between groups and exploratory change vs. stable exploitation). It was expected that the differing requirements of the four dynamics would contingently select for relatively healthier- or intelligent-looking leaders. We found perceived facial intelligence to be a second-order context-specific trait—for instance, in times requiring a leader to address between-group cooperation—whereas perceived health is significantly preferred across all contexts (i.e., a first-order trait). The results also indicate that facial health positively affects perceived masculinity while facial intelligence negatively affects perceived masculinity, which may partially explain leader choice in some of the environmental contexts. The limitations and a number of implications regarding leadership biases are discussed.

Perception of health from facial cues

“…Health judgements have been shown to influence judgements of both attractiveness and leadership ability [3,4]; so if you have a picture on an online dating site or a professional network profile you may wish to update it in light of our findings. An image with a healthy skin tone and a positive expression could improve your chances of love and success.…”

“…This indicates that facial shape mediates the relationship between BMI and perceived health. 4 In a two-step linear regression, actual BMI explained 13.5% of variance in perceived health through linear (b ¼ 1.11, p ¼ 0.115) and squared terms (b ¼ 21.42, p ¼ 0.044). The addition of face BMI scores at step two did not significantly improve the model (R 2 change ¼ 0.01, p ¼ 0.645).…”

“…Understanding how these judgements are informed is important because they feed into other social judgements such as attractiveness [1][2][3] or leadership ability [4], which is potentially consequential in terms of real-life outcomes, such as dating and or employment outcomes. Other social consequences may stem directly from judgements of health because maintaining a physical distance from those who are perceived to be unhealthy has clear evolutionary benefits through avoidance of contagious disease.…”

Politics, lies and video tapes: Non verbal cues and signals in the age of 'fake news'

“…These traits, in turn, are important when dealing with internal challenges to group stability that require political strategies involving nurturance (Laustsen & Petersen, 2016;Little, Roberts, Jones, & DeBruine, 2012;Spisak, Dekker, Krüger, & van Vugt, 2012). Furthermore, cues regarding age and health such as skin colouring and symmetry provide insights regarding stability of leadership and potential decisions made (Schubert, Curran, & Strungaru, 2011;Spisak, Blaker, Lefevre, Moore, & Krebbers, 2014).…”

Assessing the accuracy of perceptions of intelligence based on heritable facial features

“…In an employment setting, interviewers are likely to seek to confirm pre-conceived intelligence evaluations, which can affect their judgement during hiring decisions (Judice & Neuberg, 1998). Perceptions of intelligence have also been found to influence leadership decisions (Spisak, Blaker, Lefevre, Moore, & Krebbers, 2014).…”