TRC

Do you form judgments of others based on how they look? Very likely. These judgments are not just about commonly understood features such as skin color, but also about more subtle ones like the shape of a person's face. Research has shown that babyfaced people are seen as kinder, warmer and physically weaker than maturefaced people, as well as more honest and naive. Given this, are there consequences for a company that has a babyface CEO (or spokesperson) in a time of crisis? Will the shape of the person's face affect how the company is perceived and will these considerations have an effect on the hiring of a new CEO? These questions were investigated by some researchers in a series of experiments.

In the first experiment the researchers tested whether the face shape of the CEO affected perceptions of intentional wrong doing by the company. They found that when the CEO had a babyface, the company was more likely to be absolved of intentional wrong doing. But this changes when the severity of the crises increased. Then the shape of the face has no impact on perceptions of the company.

So what is happening here is that because babyfacedness is associated with honesty, people are more likely to cut some slack for the company if it is perceived to have done something unintentionally wrong (such as, not realize the side effects of a drug). The question then is whether this association between babyfaceness and honesty can be reversed. What if a babyface is associated with a company that is seen as having done something intentionally wrong? Would the company still get a pass? The next experiment tested this proposition and showed that it doesn't. When a company is seen as having intentionally misled the public the innocent looking CEO is not going to be of much help.

How about decisions for the future? If a company is coming out of a crisis, would the face shape of the new CEO have an effect on the perceptions of the company? This was tested in the last experiment with two scenarios; one in which a company has been involved with a vigilance (or unintentional wrong doing) problem and another in which a company has been involved with an honesty (or intentional wrong doing) problem. In the honesty problem scenario, a babyfaced faced CEO is seen as a better choice, while in the vigilance scenario a mature faced CEO is seen as a better choice.

What does all this mean? Even though face shape is a superficial characteristic, it plays a role even in weighty matters. Its effect is unconscious and likely long lasting since face shapes don't change much over time. For a company that gets itself into PR trouble, the researchers suggest "send out the babyface when the issue is one of dishonesty and the mature face when it is one of lack of vigilance".

This research was conducted by Gerald Gorn, Chair Professor of Marketing and Yuwei Jiang, a doctoral candidate, at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Gita Johar, Meyer Feldberg Professor of Marketing at Columbia University. This article appears in the March issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.