Attractiveness Bias in Groups

Edward Vul

Individuals were rated as more attractive when they were observed in a group rather than alone, reported University of California, San Diego’s Drew Walker and Edward Vul.

Individuals are generally perceived as similar but not identical to the average group face.
This group average is seen as more attractive than group members’ individual faces, thanks to a perceptual bias called the ”cheerleader effect.”

People who are judged attractive are also ascribed positive characteristics including good health, good genes, intelligence, and success as a result of attribution bias.

Michael Cunningham

There is consensus across cultures and genders on ratings of physical attractiveness, found University of Louisville’s Michael R. Cunningham, Anita P. Barbee and Perri B. Druen, who collaborated with Alan R. Roberts of Indiana University and Chung Yuan Christian University’s Cheng-Huan Wu.

Features rated as most attractive for women include:

High cheekbones and forehead,
Fuller lips,
Large, clear eyes,
Shorter jaw,
Narrower chin,
Waist-to-hips ratio of 7:10,
Body Mass Index (BMI) of 20.85.

Alan Roberts

Women’s weight was not as significantly related to attractiveness as the elements above.

Preferred characteristics for men were:

Large jaw and brow,
Prominent cheekbones,
Broad chin,
Waist-to-hips ratio of 9:10,
About 12 percent body fat.

Smooth skin, shiny hair, and facial symmetry were rated as attractive for both women and men.

Genevieve Lorenzo

Individuals’ physical attractiveness focuses observers’ attention, and enables assessments of personality traits based on brief interactions, according to University of British Columbia’s Genevieve Lorenzo and Jeremy Biesanz with Lauren Human of University of California, San Francisco.

Jeremy Biesanz

Observers more accurately identified personality traits of physically attractive people.
These ratings were more similar to attractive people’s self-reported personality traits.

Lauren Human

Volunteers showed a positive bias toward attractive people and accurately identified the relative ordering of attractive participants’ Big Five personality traits (extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience, and emotional stability, also called “neuroticism”).

Nicholas Rule

Raters also accurately evaluated CEOs’ competence, dominance, likeability, maturity, and trustworthiness by viewing photographs of the executives’ faces in a study by University of Toronto’s Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady, then of Tufts.

Nalini Ambady

Thirty volunteers assessed CEOs’ “leadership success” based on appearance alone, and these rating were significantly related to profitability of the organizations the CEOs led.

John Graham

CEOs and non-executives compete in an unconscious “corporate beauty contest,” asserted John Graham, Campbell Harvey and Manju Puri of Duke.
Executives who were viewed as attractive are assigned positive attributions, according to these researchers.

Photos of more than 100 white male chief executive officers of large and small companies were paired with with photos of non-executives with similar facial features, hairstyles and clothing.

Campbell Harvey

Nearly 2,000 participants assessed photos and rated CEOs as competent and attractive more frequently than non-executives.
However, volunteers were less likely to rate CEOs as likeable and trustworthy.

Those rated as “competent” earned more money, but in this study, CEO appearance wasn’t associated with company profitability.

Elaine Wong

Specific facial structures, not just attributed personality traits, were associated with superior business results, according to University of Wisconsin’s Elaine Wong and Michael P. Haselhuhn working with Margaret E. Ormiston of London Business School.

Firms that achieved superior financial results tended to have male CEOs with wider faces relative to facial height, particularly among organizations with “cognitively simple leadership teams.”

Margaret Ormiston

Evolutionary biology suggests that specific facial structures may be perceived as associated with trustworthy leadership skills, leading to attributions of competence, and inspiring loyalty to follow.

-*What positive bias do you observe toward attractive individuals in the workplace?

-*How do you harness the positive bias toward attractive individuals?

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©Kathryn Welds

Ask for What You Want: You Have More Influence Than You Think

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Most people underestimate the likelihood that requests for help will be granted, particularly after previous refusals, according to Stanford’s Daniel Newark and Francis Flynn with Vanessa Lake Bohns, then of University of Waterloo.

Contrary to this expectation, most people agree to a subsequent request, possibly to reduce discomfort of rejecting others’ overtures for help.

In a study, participants estimated they would need to ask 10 people to get three people who would agree to lend their mobile phones for brief calls.

In fact, volunteers asked substantially fewer people for this favour, an average of six people.
The team concluded that most people hold a pessimistic bias about the likelihood that others will provide assistance.

In another study, volunteers requested two favours from people they did not know:

1. Complete a brief survey,
2. Take a letter to a nearby post office.

Help seekers predicted that people who refused the first request to complete the survey would be less likely to take the letter to the post office.

In contrast, more people agreed to the second request than to the first request.
Requesters tended to “anchor” on the first refusal, and hesitated to make a second request.
This finding suggests that requesters have a greater chance of agreement after initial refusal, so it’s advisable to persist.

The researchers concluded that help-seekers and potential helpers analysed requests according to different criteria.

Help-seekers typically considered the magnitude of the “ask,” whereas potential helpers considered the inconvenience costs of saying “yes” compared with the interpersonal and self-image costs of saying “no.”

This underestimation bias may be reduced by:

Comparing actual degree of personal influence compared to perceived influence,
Considering the means of influence, including incentives, suggestions, reinforcements, punishments,
Invoking organizational culture.

These findings suggest the benefit of asking for what you want and that you have more influence over others than you expect.

-*How do you assess your likelihood of getting what you want when you ask?

-*How likely are others to influence you by evoking social discomfort to increase your compliance?

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©Kathryn Welds

How Accurate are Personality Judgments Based on Physical Appearance?

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Laura Naumann

People pictured in full-body photographs were evaluated by volunteers for likeability, self-esteem, loneliness, religiosity, and political orientation based on their photographed clothing and non-verbal behaviours.

Simine Vazire

This study, conducted by Sonoma State University’s Laura Naumann, with Simine Vazire then of Washington University, teamed with University of Cambridge’s Peter Rentfrow, and Samuel Gosling ofUniversity of Texas, also investigated volunteers’ accuracy in judging Big Five personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism), proposed by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae of the U.S. National Institutes of Health

Peter Jason Rentfrow

These ratings were compared with evaluations by people acquainted the photographed person.

Samuel Gosling

Observers’ judgments were accurate for extraversion, self-esteem, and religiosity when people were photographed in a standardised pose.
Raters were correct for additional personality traits when judging photographs in spontaneous, informal poses.

Paul Costa

These findings suggest that candid photographs provide more accurate cues to some personality characteristics than planned poses.
People may be able to “manage” perceptions by others based on an intentional body pose.

Robert McCrae

Judgments based on clothing cues were associated with less accurate judgments of personality characteristics.
In contrast, facial expression and posture enabled more accurate judgments.

John Irving

Observers can make accurate inferences about some personality characteristics based on visual cues, according to these findings.

Novelist John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany noted that “Things often are as they appear. First impressions matter,” just as these researchers concluded.

-*How accurate are your judgments of personality traits for people you have not previously met?
-*How accurate are other people’s inferences about your personality traits?

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©Kathryn Welds

Inferring Others’ Thoughts, Intentions, Behavior

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Developing accurate inferences about others’ expectations and possible actions is essential for successful social interactions.

The brain’s process to predict others’ thoughts and behaviors was investigated by University College London’s Demis Hassabis, with R. Nathan Spreng of Cornell University, Vrije Universiteit’s Andrei A. Rusu, Harvard’s Clifford A. Robbins and Daniel Schacter, and Raymond A. Mar of York University.

Volunteers read four accounts of fictional individuals’ personality traits, then imagined each character’s behaviours in different situations.
Afterward, participants underwent fMRI brain scans.

Accurate inferences about characters’ personality traits and behaviours were associated with activity in the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain, demonstrating that “brain activity can reveal what and whom someone is thinking about.”

Other cortical areas were associated with Judgments of people’s degree of agreeableness (Lateral temporal cingulate) and extraversion (posterior cingulate).

These brain regions “code” inferred personality traits in others and synthesise these characteristics into “personality models” that represent individuals and their likely behaviours in new situations.

People can also infer others’emotional intentions through unseen touch, reported Matthew Hertenstein with DePauw University colleagues Brittany Bulleit and Ariane Jaskolka, UC Berkeley’s Dacher Keltner and Betsy App of University of Denver.

Two hundred volunteers in the United States and Spain accurately perceived anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, and sympathy through a stranger’s unseen touch on the participants’ arms.

Observers also accurately identified emotions conveyed by touchers’ “tactile displays” toward paired volunteers.

Gian Gonzaga of UCLA collaborated with Keltner and University of Wisconsin’s Daniel Ward to investigate differences in ability to infer emotion among male-female communication pairs.

The researchers attributed high power to one volunteer in a communication pair, then compared interactions when male-female pairs were in an equal-power condition.

Participants who were ascribed high power made less accurate judgments of the communication partner’s emotion.
Individuals who were assigned the low power role reported greater self-consciousness and anxiety.

Men engaged in power behaviours even when female participants were attributed equal power, but displayed fewer power behaviours when both participants were men.
These studies confirm power differentials between women and men.

In addition, male-female pairs misinterpreted the partner’s attempts to convey emotions (“emotion blindness” ).
Male pairs accurately detected anger, but men did not correctly report women’s anger in male-female pairs.
Likewise, women did not accurately detect men’s attempts to convey compassion.

This demonstrates gender-related limitations to accurate empathy and emotionally attuned interpersonal inferences.

-*How do you develop accurate inferences about others’ opinions and behaviours?

-*How do you revise your hypotheses about others’ personalities?

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“Feminine Charm” as Negotiation Tactic

4 Replies

Charlotte Brontë

Feminine charm” was one of the few available negotiation tactics for women in past decades, portrayed in novels by Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and George Eliot

Jane Austen

Former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that she used “charm” in negotiations with heads of state. This statement inspired University of California, Berkeley’s Laura Kray and Alex Van Zant with Connson Locke of London School of Economics to investigate “feminine charm” in negotiation situations.

Madeleine Albright

They found that “the aim of feminine charm is to make an interaction partner feel good as a way of gaining compliance” and “charm” is characterised by:

Laura Kray

Friendliness, or concern for the other person,
Flirtation, or concern for self-presentation.

Hannah Riley Bowles

“Feminine charm” (friendliness plus flirtation) partially buffered the social penalties (“backlash”) against women’s efforts to negotiate, identified by Harvard’s Hannah Riley Bowles and her colleagues.

Linda Babcock

Women who were perceived as flirtatious achieved superior economic deals in negotiations compared with women who were seen as friendly.

This finding validates Carnegie Mellon’s Linda Babcock’s observation that women achieve better negotiation outcomes when they combine power tactics with warmth.

These research results expose “a financial risk associated with female friendliness:…the resulting division of resources may be unfavourable if she is perceived as ‘too nice’.”

-*How do you mitigate the “financial risk associated with female friendliness”?

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Writing Power Primer Increases Efficacy in High-Stakes Performance

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Adam Galinsky

“Power ...(regulates) human interaction…it creates patterns of deference, reduces conflict, creates division of labor,” wrote Columbia’s Adam Galinsky.

He evaluated a power-enhancing technique to investigate whether feelings of power are associated with different outcomes in professional interviews.

David Dubois

Collaborating with David Dubois of INSEAD, Tilburg University’s Joris Lammers, and Derek Rucker of Northwestern University, they asked job applicants and business school admission candidates to write about a time they felt powerful or powerless.

Joris Lammers

Independent judges who were unaware of the different instructions, rated “applicant’s” written and face-to-face interview performance.
Evaluators assigned highest scores to those who recalled power experiences.

Derek Rucker

Judges preferred power-primed applicants, citing their greater persuasiveness and confidence.
These candidates received more offers of job roles and business school admission than those who wrote about powerless experiences or situations unrelated to feelings of power and powerlessness.

Sian Beilock

An earlier post highlighted Sian Beilock’s investigation of writing as a coping tool in stressful academic situations.
Her collaborators at University of Chicago, Vanderbilt, and Pace Universities showed that students could manage test anxiety by writing about their concerns to maintain a calm mindset.

Recalling an experience of personal power can influence impressions of persuasiveness, competence, and likeability in professional interviews.
This effect can be enhanced by writing about power experiences to increase confidence and optimism when working toward desired goals.

-*How do you prepare for challenging professional interviews?

-*How effective have your found “power primes” in high-stakes performance situations?

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Do You Accept Bad Deals?

1 Reply

Taya Cohen

Agreement bias is the tendency to agree (“settle”) in a negotiation even if the outcome is disadvantageous to one participant.

During negotiation, each participant’s positions and interests may differ.
Skillful negotiators usually end the discussion if they determine that a stalemate is likely.

Leigh Thompson

Negotiators may accept a disadvantageous deal for reasons besides personality traits, explained Carnegie Mellon’s Taya Cohen and Leigh Thompson of Northwestern with University of Toronto’s Geoffrey J. Leonardelli.

◦ Sunk Costs: Participants may wish to achieve any resolution, to derive some sense of value for the invested time and effort (“sunk costs”),

◦ Image: Negotiators may wish to appear likeable,

◦ Erroneous Anchoring Assumption: People may assume that their interests and the negotiation partner’s are mutually exclusive instead of investigating an integrative solution.

◦ Strength in Numbers: Negotiators who are outnumbered by the other negotiation team tend to agree to suboptimal deals.

Geoffrey J Leonardelli

Solo negotiators demonstrated more agreeable behavior, and were more likely to agree to unfavourable conditions.
When solo negotiators were joined by only one person, they avoided unfavourable agreements.

Douglas Jackson

Agreement bias occurs even in anonymous surveys, reported Douglas Jackson, then of Educational Testing Services and Penn State.
This acquiescence bias, is triggered when people agree to survey items no matter the content.

Samuel Messick

Social desirability concern can accelerate agreements in negotiations, surveys, and life, found Jackson and his ETS colleague Samuel Messick, in their factor analysis of Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) items.

Robin Pinkley

Inaccurate judgments of possible settlement options can lead also to unfavourable agreements, noted SMU’s Robin L. Pinkley, Terri L. Griffith of Santa Clara University, and University of Illinois’s Gregory B. Northcraft.

Terri Griffith

Pinkley’s group demonstrated ineffective outcomes when negotiators :

Accurately processed inaccurate or incomplete information
(information availability errors),
Inaccurately processed valid or complete information
(information processing errors).

Gregory Northcraft

-*How do you avoid agreeing to bad deals?

-*How do you reduce Information Availability Errors and Information Processing Errors?

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Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

Consulting Organizational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership+Career Master Coach | Coach Supervisor+Mentor Coach |

Attractiveness Bias in Groups

Ask for What You Want: You Have More Influence Than You Think

How Accurate are Personality Judgments Based on Physical Appearance?

Inferring Others’ Thoughts, Intentions, Behavior

Apologies Repair Relationships

Expressing Anger at Work: Power Tactic or Career-Limiting Strategy?

“Feminine Charm” as Negotiation Tactic

Writing Power Primer Increases Efficacy in High-Stakes Performance

How to Win the Career Advancement Contest – Tournament

Do You Accept Bad Deals?

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