Face Value: Do Certain Physical Features Help People Get Ahead?

Dec 04, 2023

Can business leaders harness the star power of celebrities? It might depend on their jawline.

A recent study parses 12,000 faces for attributes linked to charisma and proposes a framework to figure out who has it and who doesn't. Why some people stand out from the crowd and get to the top can be empirically predicted with a machine learning model, suggests work by Shunyuan Zhang, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, and collaborators.

Zhang defines charisma as a leader's moral conviction, need for power, and ability to transfer an idealized vision to followers—it's more than just straight-up beauty. Having it can mean the difference between making it to the C-suite and getting stuck in middle management, and Zhang's model shows that certain facial features are more associated with the visual aspect of charisma than others.

"Our research represents the first empirical attempt to characterize the relationships between charisma and facial features," explains Zhang. She conducted the study with Xiaohang Feng, a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon and the paper's lead author; Kannan Srinivasan, professor at Carnegie Mellon; Xiao Liu, associate professor at New York University; and Cait Poynor Lamberton, professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The work could have ripples in the cutthroat business world, where carefully managing image matters and well-applied filters, makeup, or hairstyles could optimize the visual aspect of charisma. However, knowing a potential employee's "charisma score"—a measure the researchers created—could also uncover hidden bias and force hiring managers to challenge preconceived notions.

"An evaluator may not even be aware of how much someone's facial attributes are driving interpersonal judgments," Zhang says.

Traditionally, people assess charisma based on personality. However, the researchers took a different tack. They focused on appearance, linking 11 specific facial features to traits associated with charisma to arrive at a celebrity visual potential (CVP) score for 12,000 faces.

While some of the features are what you might expect—symmetry, bone structure, and having a "baby face"—a key dimension is averageness, or the extent to which a face's features align with the average features of all people of the same gender, race, and approximate age. Average faces tend to be perceived as more attractive—though they’re not always the most charismatic.

The researchers mined psychology, consumer behavior, and economic theories research to pinpoint six personality traits connected to charisma. Those traits are a sense of power or dominance, trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness, warmth, and generosity. They depict the possible theoretical relationships between CVP and the 11 facial features, with the six personality traits as mediators.

Next came the empirical validation of directions and rankings. The authors developed a deep learning model that predicts if a face could belong to a celebrity or not. And they then compared that CVP score prediction against the facial features to show which features are stronger and weaker drivers of CVP, and in what direction.

Importantly, the authors tested whether the model applied to two key contexts: media and entertainment, and business. They used profile images crawled from LinkedIn to compare the mean charisma scores of executives against those of average employees, and did the same for Instagram, comparing influencers to everyday users.

"The results showed that our model-predicted CVP is indeed consistent with human perception of celebrity potential," Feng says.

In the analysis, charisma correlated positively with high cheekbones, large eyes, and symmetry.

Another feature—facial width-to-height ratio—was a mixed bag: People with high ratios were perceived as less trustworthy and more aggressive, which outweighed their perceived generosity and dominance.

Sexual dimorphism—the degree to which a face seems more masculine or feminine—also matters: More masculinity or femininity correlates positively with charisma. Here, dominance, competence, or warmth exert a strong influence. In their empirical finding, sexual dimorphism correlated positively with CVP.

Baby-facedness correlates positively with traits such as warmth and trust but correlates negatively with traits like dominance and aggression, undercutting any benefits. In their empirical finding, babyfaceness correlated negatively with CVP. A thin jaw has composite effects: It predicts less aggressiveness, which increases charisma—but it also predicts less dominance, which reduces it. Empirically, they found that a thin jaw correlated negatively with CVP.

Meanwhile, darker skin color has a positive correlation with celebrity visual potential, but mostly for white people. The results potentially mirror the deeply ingrained biases that stem from society's white-centric beauty standards.

"We found that, for white people, a dark skin color has a positive correlation with celebrity visual potential. For Black people, the inverse is true," says Feng. The team is planning follow-up research on race and charisma perception.

Using visuals for success. The work has implications for hiring managers, business leaders, politicians, virtual influencer designers, and maybe even plastic surgeons. After all, it's possible to use makeup to get higher cheekbones or to change hairstyles to improve facial symmetry.

Beauty isn't everything. The researchers concluded that the role of attractiveness in charisma is positive, but small.

"Our most straightforward highlight is that, for CVP, facial beauty is not the dominant factor. Attractiveness is really not that important. Many other factors play an important role," Feng says.

Be aware of bias. Knowing about CVP could help reduce bias based on looks alone. "We know there are hidden biases in our daily interpersonal judgments. Can we find a way to correct this bias? I think that's an important question as we think about the implications in our daily life," Zhang says.

Feedback or ideas to share? Email the Working Knowledge team at [email protected].

Image: iStockphoto/franckreporter