Nicholas Rule

Here's a new take on the link between facial features and leadership: a U of T study examines U.S. law firms and the less reputable world of organized crime.

The study finds that among lawyers, more rugged features like a square jaw conferred an advantage over softer features like a small chin, which denotes friendliness and approachability.

But among gangsters, where powerful features are the norm, softer characteristics like bigger eyes or baby cheeks were beneficial, the findings suggest.

So in Al Capone’s case, his legendary cheek scar may have helped his tough guy appearance, but it was actually his round eyes and pudgy cheeks that made him stand out as a leader, speculates Daniel Re, the lead author of the study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

“I was watching The Sopranos, and it got me thinking – research had been done on lawyers already, but I thought nobody (looks at) lower status working groups,” said Re, who until recently was working as a post-doctoral researcher with U of T's Nicholas Rule, the Canada Research Chair in Social Perception and Cognition.

“It’s always business CEOs, politicians. I got to thinking that perhaps power traits aren’t as great for construction workers and Mafia members.”

Re's work with Rule, an associate professor of psychology in the Faculty of Arts & Science, supports the notion that distinct facial features influence who is chosen as a leader.

The research was based on separate experiments in which they asked dozens of U.S. residents to rate the headshots of law executives and members of New York’s five major mob families. The participants assessed the faces online with criteria like trustworthiness, competence and dominance.

Re, who is now working as a data scientist at Manulife, says the research has limitations since the same biases may not apply to people of different races, cultures or genders. Nevertheless, it exposes the preconceptions that can sway decisions, he says.

Appearance isn’t everything, but “if you consider your environment, you might be able to play into the stereotypes that would lead you to an advantage,” he says.

And by being aware of these biases, people can begin to overcome them, he adds.

“Part of this research is supposed to show that we are all suspect to bias in appearance when maybe we shouldn’t be.”

Read about Rule's research on facial characteristics

First impressions: U of T study says faces reveal whether we’re rich or poor

ullahnor — Wed, 05 Jul 2017 16:27:16 +0000

First impressions: U of T study says faces reveal whether we’re rich or poor

ullahnor Wed, 07/05/2017 - 12:27

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A U of T study says that your face reveals whether you're rich or poor (photo credit: ©iStock.com | LeoPatrizi)

Peter Boisseau

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Peter Boisseau

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Global Lens

In a new twist on first impressions, a U of T study finds that people can reliably tell if individuals are rich or poor just by looking at their face.

People then use those impressions in biased ways – judging the rich faces as ones to hire for jobs rather than the poor ones, says Associate Professor Nicholas Rule and graduate student Thora Bjornsdottir of the Faculty of Arts & Science, who recently published an article on the findings in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“It indicates that something as subtle as the signals in your face about your social class can actually then perpetuate it,” says Bjornsdottir. “Those first impressions can become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s going to influence your interactions, and the opportunities you have.”

Showing emotion will mask the clues

Just as interestingly, the researchers found the ability to read a person’s social class only applies to their neutral, expressionless face, and not when people are smiling or showing emotions.

Their conclusion is that emotions mask lifelong habits of expression that become etched on a person’s face even by their late teens or early adulthood, such as frequent happiness, which is stereotypically associated with being wealthy and satisfied.

“Over time, your face comes to permanently reflect and reveal your experiences,” says Rule. “Even when we think we’re not expressing something, relics of those emotions are still there.”

Using an annual median family income of about $75,000 as a benchmark, the researchers grouped student volunteers into those with total family incomes under $60,000 or above $100,000 and then had them pose for photos with neutral faces devoid of expression.

They then asked a separate group of participants to look at the photos and, using nothing but their gut instinct decide which ones were “rich or poor” just by looking at the faces. They were able to determine which student belonged to the rich or poor group at a level that researchers say exceeds random chance.

“What we’re seeing is students who are just 18-22 years old have already accumulated enough life experience that it has visibly changed and shaped their face to the point you can tell what their socio-economic standing or social class is,” says Rule.

Facial recognition is hard-wired in the brain

The results were not affected by the race or gender of the face or how much time people were given to study them. All of which is consistent with what is known about nonverbal behaviour.

“There are neurons in the brain that specialize in facial recognition. The face is the first thing you notice when you look at somebody,” says Rule. “We see faces in clouds, we see faces in toast. We are sort of hardwired to look for face-like stimuli. And this is something people pick up very quickly. And they are consistent, which is what makes it statistically significant.”

“People are not really aware of what cues they are using when they make these judgments,” says Bjornsdottir.

“If you ask them why, they don’t know. They are not aware of how they are doing this.”

For social psychologists, the face is the place

The study of social classes as an undercurrent in psychology and behaviour is getting more recognition, says Rule. And with 43 muscles concentrated in a relatively small area, facial cues are one of the most intriguing areas in this field.

“People talk about the cycle of poverty, and this is potentially one contributor to that.”

He says the next step might be to study older age groups to see if the patterns of facial cues become even more apparent to people over time.

U of T study probes police shootings of unarmed black men by looking at how we perceive size by race

ullahnor — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 20:49:31 +0000

U of T study probes police shootings of unarmed black men by looking at how we perceive size by race

ullahnor Tue, 03/14/2017 - 16:49

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Protesters against police shootings have stood up in support of unarmed victims of police killings like Michael Brown who was shot to death in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 (photo by Joe Brusky via Flickr)

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The study says police shooting are often accompanied by explanations that cite the physical size of the person shot, and that people see black men as larger and more threatening

According to ��Ƶ research, people have a tendency to perceive black men as larger and more threatening than similarly-sized white men.

In a paper published by the American Psychological Association, entitled “Racial Bias in Judgments of Physical Size and Formidability: From Size to Threat,” researchers say that unarmed black men are disproportionately more likely to be shot and killed by police and that these killings are often accompanied by explanations that cite the physical size of the person shot.

“Our findings suggest that people’s stereotypes distort their vision, leading them to literally see black men as larger than white men even when they are exactly the same size,” said Nicholas Rule, an associate professor of psychology in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

Read the Vice story

The researchers found that even black participants displayed this bias, but while they judged young black men to be more muscular than young white men, they did not judge them to be more harmful or deserving of force.

In one experiment, where participants were shown identically sized bodies labelled either black or white, they were more likely to describe the black ones as taller and heavier. In another, the size bias was most pronounced for the men whose facial features looked the most stereotypically black.

“We found that men with darker skin and more stereotypically black facial features tended to be most likely to elicit biased-size perceptions, even though they were actually no larger than men with lighter skin and less stereotypical facial features,” said Wilson. “Thus, the size bias doesn’t rely just on a white-versus-black group boundary. It also varies within black men according to their facial features.”

Black men are disproportionately more likely to be killed in interactions with police, even when unarmed, according to Wilson, and this research suggests that misperceptions of black men’s body size might be one contributor to police decisions to shoot.

But, he cautioned, the studies do not simulate real-world threat scenarios like those facing actual police officers.

“Knowing about these biases gives us the opportunity to monitor ourselves and overcome them,” said Rule. “But because law enforcement personnel have to make such quick decisions under extreme stress, they need to rely on their instincts more than most people. We need to better understand how that stress affects these misperceptions to figure out effective strategies to help officers, and the people they protect.”

The research was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Previous research, also published in this journal, suggested that people view younger black men as older and less innocent than similarly-aged white boys, and that training and experience can help police overcome racial bias in shoot-don’t shoot scenarios.

Looking for a non-profit CEO? Choose a teddy bear, not a shark: ��Ƶ study

krisha — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 14:39:43 +0000

Looking for a non-profit CEO? Choose a teddy bear, not a shark: ��Ƶ study krisha Wed, 06/22/2016 - 10:39

Peter McMahon

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Peter McMahon

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Research & Innovation. Faculty of Arts & Science

how to tell a trustworthy face from an untrustworthy face

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Not-for-profits raise more money when leader looks less powerful, research finds

Having the face of a leader may depend on whether the enterprise being led is a for-profit business or a non-profit organization, new research from the ��Ƶ has found.

It's the latest finding by the social perception and cognition experts who've advised us on:

how much weight we'd need to lose to seem more attractive to others

what our selfie habits reveal about us

In a paper entitled “Predicting Firm Success from the Facial Appearance of Chief Executive Officers of Non-Profit Organizations,” published in the journal Perception, Daniel Re, a postdoctoral fellow and Nicholas Rule, an associate professor of psychology, report on three separate studies that suggest the facial features of successful non-profit CEOs are noticeably different from leaders of for-profit companies.

Power and charity don't mix

For the first study, Re, Rule and team showed images of the faces of many of the CEOs of the 100 highest-revenue non-profit organizations – or NPOs – as listed by Forbes for 2009, 2010 and 2011.

A group of 169 participants were shown closely-cropped black and white photos of CEO faces – but not told they were CEOs – and asked to rate them on dominance, likability, facial maturity, and trustworthiness, as well as leadership, age, attractiveness, and happiness.

The researchers then grouped some of the scores together, combining dominance and facial maturity into a score they called 'power', for example, as well as grouping trustworthiness and likability into a score they labelled 'warmth'.

They found that the non-profit CEO faces that the participants saw as having high 'power' scores tended to have lower total revenue, funding from private sources, and fundraising efficiency for their organizations than non-profits with CEOs that ranked lower on the power index.

"The results were actually much more dramatic than I would have thought," says Re. "Previous studies have shown that CEOs who appear dominant seem to do well when it comes to generating wealth. But for NPOs, we found the opposite."

Sharks vs teddy bears

Re and Rule also had a group of participants look at the faces of CEOs of profit-based businesses. The participants’ scores suggested that the CEOs of successful for-profit companies look more powerful than the CEOs of NPOs.

This seems to support the results of previous studies that have suggested facial cues of power signal real dominance, aggression, and selfishness, and that people who display these facial cues may enjoy greater success as leaders of companies where the main goal is personal gain and stakeholder wealth.

A new view of non-profit leadership

"Even though the most successful CEOs of for-profit businesses might be these cut-throat, intense sharks, that's not necessarily the key to good leadership across-the-board," says Re.

"What we seem to have found is that people who come off as more powerful won't get as far or do as well working at non-profits," says Re. "It's not necessarily that non-profits are picking softer-looking people, it's that such people – perhaps drawn to working for a nobler cause – are likely the ones who have gotten ahead and risen through the ranks throughout their career in the non-profit industry."

Losing weight can make you more attractive, experts say – but there's a catch

sgupta — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 12:02:22 +0000

Losing weight can make you more attractive, experts say – but there's a catch sgupta Thu, 12/03/2015 - 07:02

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“When it comes to incentives for weight loss, some people are more motivated to look attractive than to improve their health,” Daniel Re said (photo by Allan Foster via Flickr)

Sean Bettam

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Sean Bettam

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Breaking Research

Can you tell a trustworthy from an untrustworthy face? The answer may surprise you

sgupta — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 11:43:06 +0000

Can you tell a trustworthy from an untrustworthy face? The answer may surprise you sgupta Mon, 08/17/2015 - 07:43

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Professor Nicholas Rule of U of T's Social Perception & Cognition Lab

Veronica Zaretski

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