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.