Facial width-to-height ratio differs by social rank across organizations, countries, and value systems

Abstract

Facial Width-to-Height Ratio (fWHR) has been linked with dominant and aggressive behavior in human males. We show here that on portrait photographs published online, chief executive officers (CEOs) of companies listed in the Dow Jones stock market index and the Deutscher Aktienindex have a higher-than-normal fWHR, which also correlates positively with their company’s donations to charitable causes and environmental awareness. Furthermore, we show that leaders of the world’s most influential non-governmental organizations and even the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, the popes, have higher fWHR compared to controls on public portraits, suggesting that the relationship between displayed fWHR and leadership is not limited to profit-seeking organizations. The data speak against the simplistic view that wider-faced men achieve higher social status through antisocial tendencies and overt aggression, or the mere signaling of such dispositions. Instead they suggest that high fWHR is linked with high social rank in a more subtle fashion in both competitive as well as prosocially oriented settings.

Morphometric traits predict educational attainment independently of socioeconomic background

“…The result that both boys and girls with narrower, less masculine faces were more likely to obtain higher education is notable as it contrasts with previous finding that both male and female university students with relatively wider faces gained better grades in orally examined courses [50] and that face masculinity predicts success in various competitive and pro-socially oriented settings [77]. Our finding is also not compatible with studies showing the positive association between circulating testosterone levels and cognitive abilities (see Introduction).…”

Facial width-to-height ratio is associated with agonistic and affiliative dominance in bonobos ( Pan paniscus )

“…In summary, our study demonstrates that fWHR is linked to both agonistic and affiliative forms of social dominance in a non-human species. In conjunction with previous work linking fWHR and social dominance behaviour in humans [9,10], macaques [13] and capuchins [14,15], our findings suggest that facial morphology may provide reliable cues of status-seeking motivation and testosterone exposure prior to sexual maturity. Identifying whether non-human primates use this information for social decision-making is thus a clear target for future research.…”

“…The association between fWHR and behaviour is therefore expected to reflect the relative costs and benefits of particular dominance strategies in the species and socioecology under investigation. Consistent with this hypothesis, higher fWHR has been found to predict aggression in relatively low-status men [20], but also prosocial leadership in high-status men [10]. Moreover, as expected given the higher costs of physical aggression for human females, fWHR in females is associated with self-reported dominance and verbal aggression but not with physical aggression [9,21].…”

“…While fWHR has been linked to variation in agonistic dominance styles across macaque species [13], the present study is the first to demonstrate that fWHR also predicts intraspecific variation in affiliative dominance in a nonhuman primate. This provides a crucial link to human research demonstrating positive associations between fWHR and prosocial behaviour in high-status contexts [10]. Indeed, the stronger association between affiliative dominance and fWHR (Cohen'sf 2 ¼ 0:54) compared to agonistic dominance (f 2 ¼ 0:13) is consistent with the greater importance of coalitionary support and affiliation in bonobo societies [23,25,26], and thus, the role of testosterone for promoting socioecologically relevant status-seeking behaviour rather than aggression per se [1,18].…”

Bizygomatic Width and Personality Traits of the Relational Field

“…The traditional focus of this relationship is been studied from the perspective of the syndromes, where face and brain are affected at the same time (Jones, 2007), as evidenced by disorders such as schizophrenia (Lin et al, 2015) or bipolar disorder (Hennessy et al, 2010). Regarding specific facial variables, fWHR is one of the most studied, with evidence that linked it with leadership in both competitive and prosocial environments (Hahn et al, 2017), integrity (Ormiston et al, 2017), sexual desire, sociosexuality and fidelity intention (Arnocky et al, 2017) and some psychopathic personality traits such as boldness, dominance, egocentricity impulsivity and general psychopathic scores (Anderl et al, 2016). There are other facial variables that have yielded significant results such as the inclination of the forehead and impulsivity (Guerrero et al, 2016;Guerrero-Apolo et al, 2018a) and the volume of gray matter in certain areas of the cortex (Guerrero-Apolo et al, 2018b), age, testosterone and strength with the lower/full face ratio, cheekbone prominence and fWHR-lower (Hodges-Simeon et al, 2016), or the difference of widths between bizygomatic and bigonial arches with traits such as self-reliance and the ability/ impairment to express and feel emotions (Gabarre-Mir et al, 2017).…”