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Professionalizing Facial Features

We know that facial expressions hugely shape social interactions, but they also shape professional evaluations, as well.

A recent blog by the Association for Psychological Science (APS) critically examines the extant research on the connection between nonverbal behavior and professional evaluations. This article seeks to summarize the role that facial features, such as facial hair, eyebrows, and head tilts, have on others’ perceptions.

Perhaps the least controllable of these are facial features like width, or more specifically, the ratio between the width of our face and its height. While this may seem ridiculous, past research has consistently found a relationship between perceived anti-social tendency and facial width.

However, as the APS points out, this perception fails to hold with people that we have actually gotten to know. Still, it says something about the immediate, almost instinctive, process of emotional and facial recognition.

While facial width is not mutable, facial hair certainly is, and beards can have profound impacts on people’s perceptions of us. For instance, bearded men are more likely to be perceived as angry than their clean-shaven counterparts, but they are less likely to be perceived as sad or happy.

Despite the association with aggression, beards can also relate to positive evaluations of professional competence.

Certainly, this does not seem like a logical evaluation, but it does not have to be in order to have significant impacts on perception. Another such feature is, even more absurdly, eyebrows!

The role of eyebrows connects closely to our blog from last week, as they are emphasized and deemphasized along with various head tilts, and we know that head tilts have significant impacts on perceived dominance and strength.

However, what may have been missing from the study we blogged on last week, is the role of eyebrows in the importance of head tilts. While that study emphasized the importance of the eyes in the process, APS cites research performed by University of British Columbia psychologists who found that the effect of head tilt actually disappeared when eyebrows were removed from the image.

While we know that microexpressions and a host of nonverbal behaviors have profound impacts on social interaction, it is also important to look at the role of actual facial features, like facial hair, symmetry, and even eyebrows. As this research shows, those can have profound impacts as well.

Certainly, as APS emphasizes, these impacts can carry into the professional world. Traits such as emotionality may result in less positive evaluations of one’s competence, while perceived dominance will likely have the opposite effect.

Yet, it is not only the professional world that makes these evaluations salient. Even everyday interaction can be profoundly shifted by whether we are perceived as angry, dominant, or happy. Often, we might not even be aware of these evaluations, making sustained efforts to learn how to best read people’s non-verbal behavior that much more important.

Nonverbal Expression of Dominance

Fig. 2. Stimuli used in Study 1 (top row) and Study 2 (middle and bottom rows). From left to right, the poses illustrate downward head tilts, neutral head angles, and upward head tilts. In all images, targets posed with neutral facial expressions (i.e., no facial-muscle movement).(University of British Columbia)

While we often talk about prominent examples of nonverbal behavior, like the triumphant pose, many are actually quite subtle.

A fascinating new study out of the University of British Columbia looked at the marked impact of something as simple as head position in evaluations of a person’s inclination towards dominance. This study found that a slight downward tilt of the head, while still maintaining eye contact, is often perceived as a dominant and intimidating signal.

In their first experiment, study authors Zachary Witkower and Jessica Tracy recruited subjects online to view a series of computer-generated images of faces. After being shown each image, the participants were asked to rate the person based on perceptions of dominance. This involved answering questions like whether that person “would enjoy having control over others” or “would be willing to use aggressive tactics.”

Consistently, they found that the faces slightly tilted downwards, while still maintaining a level gaze, were rated higher in dominance than the control. While an upward head tilt was also generally significant, its effect was greatly dwarfed by the downward tilt.

Of course, the attentive reader would notice that there could be something wrong with asking participants to look at computer-generated images. In order to address this, the study authors went further and conducted additional studies.

The first of these simply sought to replicate the previous study using actual images of people’s faces, maintaining the same control as well as an upward and downward tilt for comparison. This generally replicated the findings of the first study.

But what about the downwardly tilted face has this impact? Is it knowing that the head is tilted? Or does tilting the head downward have certain impacts on facial muscles that create this impression?

In addressing this final question, Drs. Witkower and Tracy conducted a third study which, instead of exposing participants to images of faces, instead exposed participants to narrow bands of those same faces, this time just showing the eyes.

Noting that these bands still showed marked differences, such a model helped evaluate whether it was a change in eye position or the actual head tilt that promoted a sense of dominance. They also showed participants images of faces, tilted and otherwise, with the eyes missing.

This final study found that the dominance-inducing effect of head tilt was only present when the eyes were, and it did not seem to require the entire face. This indicates that something about the eyes and the related muscles convey that image of power.

Questions of dominance are incredibly important in many of the same contexts that microexpressions are. In conducting an interview or interrogation, it behooves the investigator to show a sense of authority and power. Similarly, recognizing this tactic in other people might greatly benefit your ability to read them effectively.

Social Influence in Investigative Interviews

We talk a lot about how to understand people’s emotions and how to read what they say accurately, but what about learning how we can change our behavior so that they are more forthcoming?

This is the subject of a recent paper by Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang. In this study, they sought to examine the impact that different cues of authority had on information interviews. This was an attempt to determine whether the truth-tellers or the liars in a mock interview context were more likely to convey information, depending on the influence of the interviewer.

After recruiting participants, they were divided into a treatment and control group. The treatment group was encouraged to commit a mock crime but told not to disclose that they had done so, while the control group simply proceeded directly to the informational interview.

This design split the participants into those who had to lie and those who had to tell the truth during the interview, with each being encouraged by a small monetary payout to convince the interviewer that they were telling the truth and had not committed the crime.

However, there were other experimental conditions at play, namely the environmental context and appearance of the interviewer. In order to prime a sense of interviewer authority, for instance, some of the interviewer wore intimidating suits or had impressive degrees and law enforcement posters on the wall.

Nothing beyond those environmental factors was different. All of the interviewers followed the same script and spoke in comparable fashions, but previous research has seen profound differences in perceptions of authority based on these apparently simple differences.

Overall, they found that the authority conditions got truth-telling participants to freely volunteer more information than their counterparts in low-authority conditions. However, there was no effect for the liars.

Interestingly, the effect of the authority condition seemed to hold even for the truth-tellers written statements, even though these were completed after the interview. This suggests that there is some lasting impact from an impression of interviewer authority.

This helps expand on previous work that looked at how to evaluate interviewees’ truthfulness and emotions by looking instead at what can promote efficacy by the interviewer. It appears that these signs of authority, even if limited to clothing, can result in more forthcoming interviews.

While this appeared to only work on people who were already telling the truth, that does not take away from the usefulness of this information. Many interviews are conducted on truthtellers, with the struggle sometimes involving getting tight-lipped people to speak more freely. Wearing a suit or even putting your diploma on the wall might help here!

In the meantime, there is always more that needs to be learned about how to tell if your interlocuter is lying, so check out Humintell’s exciting training procedure!