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.
Highlights
An increasingly researched measure of facial appearance is the width of a face in relation to its height
We found Facial Width-to-Height Ratio (fWHR) in the photographs of both the DOW Jones and the Deutscher Aktienindex (DAX) chief executive officers (CEOs) to be higher than that of the large control group, the difference remained below significance for the DAX group
To address our second question of whether the link between fWHR on the published photographs and social rank may be bound to competitive and individualistic social value systems, we assessed the association of fWHR in the photographs of the leaders on the one hand and measures of their prosocial engagement and popularity on the other
Summary
An increasingly researched measure of facial appearance is the width of a face in relation to its height (facial Width-to-Height Ratio, fWHR). Empirical studies have consistently linked the measure with antisocial behavioral tendencies in a large number of well-controlled studies. Men with high fWHR were described to be more aggressive [1,2,3,4], more fearlessdominant [5], higher in psychopathy [6], and less likely to die from direct physical violence than narrower-faced males [7]. Wider faced men are more willing to cheat in order to increase their financial gains, more readily exploit the trust of others, and more often explicitly deceive their counterparts in a negotiation [5, 8,9,10].
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