The Tell: The Little Clues That Reveal Big Truths about Who We Are by Matthew Hertenstein

Author:Matthew Hertenstein [Hertenstein, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780465069880
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2013-11-11T14:00:00+00:00

POWER: assessed by ratings of CEOs’ competence, dominance, and facial maturity

WARMTH: assessed by ratings of CEOs’ likeability and trustworthiness

LEADERSHIP: assessed on a seven-point scale in response to the question “How good would this person be at leading a company?”

How could strangers, who know nothing about the identities of the CEOs or the companies they run, look at the businessmen’s faces and predict the success of their companies? And yet, a link surfaced: CEOs with faces perceived as powerful—competent, dominant, and mature—were significantly more likely to run profitable companies; those with less-powerful-looking faces tended to run companies at the bottom of profitability. CEOs whom subjects thought would be good at leading a company were significantly more likely to manage profitable enterprises. These findings held even when researchers statistically controlled for CEOs’ attractiveness, emotional displays in the photos, and age. The CEOs’ perceived warmth had no link to profits. A follow-up study showed that competence and leadership ratings, but not the other traits, also predicted profits of Fortune 1000 companies run by female CEOs. According to Rule and Ambady, “The ability to infer success from faces is applicable to both male and female CEOs.”

“These findings,” wrote the authors, “suggest that naive judgments may provide more accurate assessments of individuals than well-informed judgments can.” In fact, most previous studies that have failed to find potential links between CEOs’ characteristics and the success of their companies have relied on surveys from employees who know their bosses. The fact that people who know nothing about a CEO can predict his or her company’s profits is powerful. Might it be prudent for boards of trustees who hire CEOs to take into account strangers’ perceptions of candidates’ faces? Obviously, this is only one piece of evidence that merits replication, but it’s an empirically valid finding that’s difficult to argue with.

Objective Criteria That Predict CEO Performance

A distinction is relevant at this point. With the student evaluations discussed in the previous chapter, the predicted outcome is a subjective criterion since it depends on people’s perceptions of instructor quality. In contrast, Rule and Ambady’s study on CEOs found that subjects’ ratings of a variety of traits based on photographs could predict an objective criterion: company profitability. Here, a subjective measure, people’s perceptions of power, predicted a real-world objective criterion, profits.

Are there objective means to predict objective outcomes among the CEOs’ businesses? We can investigate this question from two angles. First, can we measure any objective predictor variables within the perceivers of the CEOs that predict the performance of companies? Second, can we measure any objective predictor variables in the CEOs themselves to predict the performance of their companies? Let’s take each of these questions in turn.

To answer the first question, Rule, Ambady, and some of their colleagues asked subjects to examine sixty-eight photographs of CEOs (both men and women) for two seconds each, while a functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, machine scanned their brains to see which parts lit up. After completing this task in the scanner, subjects sat at a laptop computer and rated how successful they thought each CEO would be at leading a company.

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