General_Stanley_McChrystal
models are better looking than the average
individual in the population. Inthis case, this
is expected in that the defining feature of being
amodel is to be good-looking. Are there other
professions wherein yourlooks 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.
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'sascendancy 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 particularcontexts.
In line with this reasoning, Mueller and Mazur
found that thefacial dominance of the cadets was
operative in predicting more seniormilitary promotions
(i.e., at the level of Colonel and General). Ofcourse
, facial dominance was not the sole predictor of
ascendancy in themilitary ranks. However to the
extent that it had a significanteffect, 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).
