Whatever Works by Thalma Lobel

Author:Thalma Lobel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781950665266
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2020-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Baby Face

I was once a member of a committee that had to choose someone for a managerial position that required dominance and leadership. After interviewing several candidates, there were two that we liked the best. One of them was a young man with what you might call a “baby face”—a round face with a small nose, large eyes, small chin, and high forehead. Both candidates seemed intelligent and had similar experience and references. All the members of the committee gave higher evaluations to the candidate who had a more mature face. The committee said that both of them were good, but their gut feeling was to choose the more mature-looking candidate. In the end, neither of them was chosen for the job for different reasons, but I kept asking myself what caused us all to prefer one over the other. I could not remember anything really differentiating them besides the baby face, which might have made him look a bit submissive and naïve. Is it possible that was the only reason we all thought he was not dominant enough?

People make all kinds of inferences and judgments when they look at a baby-faced person, not just that the person is cute. Social psychologist Leslie Zebrowitz, a well-known expert on face perception and facial stereotypes, has conducted many studies that demonstrate that individuals with baby-faced features are judged as warmer and more honest, trustworthy, innocent, and naïve. (Findings from an enlightening study on social perceptions show that criminal defendants with baby faces received more lenient sentences than others with more mature faces.18)

Zebrowitz and her colleagues show that in screening candidates for senior executive positions, baby-faced individuals were perceived as weaker and less competent than individuals who looked more mature.19 For example, baby-faced individuals were less favored as congressional leaders and for occupations requiring leadership, dominant qualities, and shrewdness. On the other hand, they were favored for occupations requiring warmth and compassion, such as nursing.20

Other studies bear out Zebrowitz’s findings. One group of researchers printed 584 identical résumés of white and black males and females with either a baby face or a mature face and put each one in stamped, unsealed envelopes addressed to the principal researcher. They attached a photograph to each résumé, with either a baby face or a more mature face. The résumés were then “lost” in all kinds of places such as phone booths, park benches, and public transit stops. The researchers wanted to examine how many of them would be sent to the address on the envelope in order to help the person who “lost” the résumé. Only 36 percent of the résumés were sent back to the address on the envelope; for white and black females and for white males, résumés with baby faces were returned more than those with mature faces. There was no difference between baby faces and mature faces for black males.21 And, in another revealing study, three marketing and business researchers created fictitious news articles about a pharmaceutical company.22 The company, according to

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