The many (distinctive) faces of leadership: Inferring leadership domain from facial appearance

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The many (distinctive) faces of leadership: Inferring leadership domain from facial appearance
The Leadership Quarterly

Previous research has shown that people form impressions of potential leaders from their faces and that certain facial features predict success in reaching prestigious leadership positions. Howevermuch less is known about the accuracy ormeta-accuracy of face-based leadership inferences. Here we examine a simple but important question: Can leadership domain be inferred from faces? We find that human judges can identify business military and sports leaders (but not political leaders) from their faces with above-chance accuracy. However people are surprisingly bad at evaluating their own performance on this judgment task:Wefind no relationship between how well judges think they performed and their actual accuracy levels. In a follow-up study we identify several basic dimensions of evaluation that correlate with face-based judgments of leadership domain as well as those that predict actual leadership domain. We discuss the implications of our results for leadership perception and selection.

Citation: 
The Leadership Quarterly 25 (2014) 817 – 834

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