Does facial structure predict academic performance?
During the past decade, individual differences in facial structure has been found to be linked to several social outcomes (Antonakis & Eubanks, 2017; Graham, Harvey, & Puri, 2017; Todorov, 2017; Todorov, Olivola, Dotsch, & Mende-Siedlecki, 2015). A particular metric, the facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR), has received a great deal of attention given its relationship to traits important to social interaction such as assertiveness or dominance (Dixson, 2017; Geniole, Keyes, Carré, & McCormick, 2014; Lefevre, Lewis, Perrett, & Penke, 2013; Valentine, Li, Penke, & Perrett, 2014; but for null results see Kosinski (2017) and Özener (2012)). For example, consistent with the notion that assertiveness is an important factor for leadership effectiveness (Hogan, 2006; Judge & Bono, 2000), Wong, Ormiston, and Haselhuhn (2011) found that firms whose CEOs had wider faces achieved superior financial performance than those whose CEOs had narrower faces. Hahn et al. (2017) found that both CEOs of companies listed in the stock market and leaders of influential non-governmental organizations tended to have higher fWHRs than matched control individuals. Interestingly, this line of research suggests that social outcomes are better explained by signals and expectations (e.g., perceptions of dominance) rather than actual behavior (Olivola, Funk, & Todorov, 2014; Stoker, Garretsen, & Spreeuwers, 2016). Other studies have suggested that self-fulfilling prophecies tend to play a major role in explaining these findings (Haselhuhn, Wong, & Ormiston, 2013).