Facial width-to-height ratio differs by social rank across organizations, countries, and value systems.

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

Mean facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) of all analyzed groups.

<p>Plainly shaded bars indicate measurements by Raters 1 and 2; patterned bars indicate measurements by Raters 1 and 3. The main analysis compares CEOs, NGOs and popes (patterned, dark grey) with the mean of all control groups (patterned, light grey). The matching analysis compares CEOs, NGOs, and popes (plain, dark grey) with their matched controls (plain, light grey), respectively. Individual control groups (patterned, light grey, thin bars) from left to right: MIT (<i>N</i> = 6), BioID (<i>N</i> = 13), Stirling (<i>N</i> = 15), BaDaDa (<i>N</i> = 22), GTdb-crop (<i>N</i> = 26), Utrecht (<i>N</i> = 28), CK+ (<i>N</i> = 31), FACES Database (<i>N</i> = 40), Aberdeen (<i>N</i> = 53), Nottingham2 (<i>N</i> = 63), FaceDB (<i>N</i> = 95). Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.</p

Scatter plots showing the associations between facial width-to-height ratio of CEOs of companies listed in the Dow Jones stock market index and performance measures.

<p>a) Employee satisfaction with their companies, b) employee satisfaction with their respective CEOs, c) the companies’ charitable donations and d) the companies’ positions in the 2012 Green Ranking (for additional analyses controlling for company revenues, see main text).</p