Judgments of Power From College Yearbook Photos and Later Career Success

Abstract

Inferences from faces can predict important real-world outcomes. But little is known about the stability of these effects. Here the authors find that inferences of power from photos of the faces of the managing partners of America's top 100 law firms significantly corresponded to their success as leaders, as measured by the amounts of profits that their firms earned. More interesting, this relationship was also observed when judgments were made based on photos of the leaders taken from their undergraduate yearbooks, before they began their careers or entered law school. Facial cues to success may therefore be consistent across much of the lifespan (approximately 20-50 years).

The Facial Appearance of CEOs: Faces Signal Selection but Not Performance

“…One of the plans for future research is to investigate other types of classes and also to investigate simultaneous separation of multiple classes. Second, information on the facial features that pre-dates the CEO appointment stemming from for instance college yearbook photos seems a promising avenue to explore the causality issue mentioned above [ 47 – 48 ].…”

Face-trait inferences show robust child–adult agreement: Evidence from three types of faces

“…Prior work has shown that judgments about others' personality from facial appearance form rapidly (Rule & Ambady, 2008a) and change little over time (Willis & Todorov, 2006). Importantly, facebased trait inferences are consistent both within and across cultures , and predict important outcomes such as election results (Ballew & Todorov, 2007;Todorov et al, 2005) and career success (Rule & Ambady, 2008b;Rule & Ambady, 2011).…”

Predicting Firm Success From the Facial Appearance of Chief Executive Officers of Non-Profit Organizations

“…Targets' choice of photos on their organizations' websites may purvey a desirable appearance for their domain, but these effects should be somewhat systematic across the sample. Furthermore, previous research has shown that facial appearance predicts executives' leadership success even when the picture is taken up to 50 years before the person attains the leadership position (Rule & Ambady, 2011b). Static facial attributes based on bone structure account for a significant proportion of first impressions (Hehman, Flake, & Freeman, 2015;Vernon, Sutherland, Young, & Hartley, 2014), we therefore expect that leadership impressions should be fairly consistent across different photos of the same person.…”

“…Similarly, judgments of how powerful law firm managing partners (MPs) look also predict their firms' profits (Rule & Ambady, 2011a), even when the judgments are made from photographs of the MPs when they were college students-on average 35 years earlier (Rule & Ambady, 2011b). Mere perceptions aside, facial features typically associated with aggression and ambition can explain the relationship between some CEOs' appearance and their firms' performance, even when controlling for company performance before the current leader assumes his or her position (Re & Rule, 2016;Wong, Ormiston, & Haselhuhn, 2011).…”