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General_Stanley_McChrystal
Few individuals would be surprised to find out that models are better looking than the average individual in the population. In this case, this is expected in that the defining feature of being a model is to be good-looking. Are there other professions wherein your looks might affect your career success? How about the military? Might it be the case that our warriors should look the part?
In 1996, Ulrich Mueller and the biosociologist Allan Mazur conducted a study to determine whether dominance-related facial features of West Point cadets (as displayed in their yearbooks) might be predictive of their promotion to the most senior military ranks. Independent raters scored the cadets' portraits on a 1 to 7 scale, ranging from ‘very submissive' to ‘very dominant'. The median score across all raters was taken as the "facial" score of a given portrait. Other variables that were investigated were athletic ability, cadets' scores on the General Order of Merit (which captures several dimensions including scholastic and leadership abilities), sociability, attendance at a War College, parents' education, and the military branch that a cadet ended up serving in.
A_Few_Good_Men
Several analyses were conducted to gauge the extent to which each of the latter variables affected career promotions. One might think that in a "pure" meritocracy, facial features should not have any effect on one's ascendancy within the organization in question. However, to the extent that valuable information is gleaned from one's facial morphology (e.g., the level of exposure to pubertal testosterone) then it might make sense that such biometrics matter in particular contexts. In line with this reasoning, Mueller and Mazur found that the facial dominance of the cadets was operative in predicting more senior military promotions (i.e., at the level of Colonel and General). Of course, facial dominance was not the sole predictor of ascendancy in the military ranks. However to the extent that it had a significant effect, this strikes me as a rather interesting finding.
In future posts, I'll be discussing several more studies that have documented the effects of our morphological features across a wide range of domains. For those interested in this area, I cover this matter in greater detail in chapter 10 of my forthcoming trade book The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature (Prometheus Books, 2011).
Source for Image:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gen._McChrystal_News_Briefing2010_cro…
