Dictator or Democratic? Judging Political Leaders by Their Faces

We’re told not to judge a book by its cover, but when it comes to human interactions, we often judge people by their faces. In fact, a large amount of literature on facial perception reveals that we’re surprisingly good at inferring all sorts of information about another person’s character, political and religious affiliation, and even sexual orientation, just to name a few.

The Look of a Leader

Research also shows that leaders in society have a particular look that makes them easy to identify. In one study, participants looked at facial photos of pairs of contestants for political office in a foreign country and guessed which one got elected. They were right about 70% of the time!

Even more surprising, young schoolchildren were also able to pick the winners at about the same rate of accuracy. This suggests that we have an evolved cognitive mechanism for perceiving leadership ability from facial appearance, since, after all, the children had no experience in political elections.

Furthermore, American research participants can reliably distinguish the political party affiliation of U.S. politicians. Specifically, Republican faces are judged to look more powerful than Democrat faces. This falls in line with the social dominance orientation that many Republicans subscribe to.

Regardless of political affiliation, democratically elected politicians tend to have facial features that suggest a whole suite of personal characteristics. Physical attractiveness is part of the equation, but we’re also looking for facial cues indicating that the candidate we’re voting for is competent, dominant (that is, leader-like), mature, and likable. While there’s still a lot of work to be done in determining exactly which specific facial features give clues to each of these personality traits, what is clear is that we can pick up on these clues with just a brief glance at a face.

Dictator or Democrat?

The research on the appearance of leadership so far has all been conducted in Western, developed societies, all of which have democratic systems of government. However, much of the world’s population live in countries that do not elect their leaders. In these authoritarian states, leaders rise to the top by means of political machination or military force.

This observation led Canadian psychologist Miranda Giacomin and her colleagues to wonder if leaders in authoritarian countries (that is, “dictators”) would differ in their facial appearance from those who were freely elected (that is, “democrats”). To explore this question, the researchers conducted two studies.

In Study 1, Giacomin and colleagues gathered photos of 160 male heads of state. They limited their selection to men because prior research has shown that we judge male and female leaders differently. Of these heads of state, 80 were freely elected “democrats” and 80 were authoritarian “dictators.” All photos were cropped to show only the head, and color photos were converted to black and white to make the items as similar as possible.

The researchers then recruited 90 American participants on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a website commonly used by social scientists to gather data from the general population. The participants viewed each photo in random order and indicated whether they thought the person was a democrat or a dictator. They successfully categorized the leaders at a rate of 69%, in line with other research on judging personal characteristics from facial appearance.

The results of Study 1 clearly show that democratically elected politicians look different from authoritarian dictators, but they don’t tell us how they differ from one another. That was the goal of Study 2.

Warm or Cold?

In this second study, a new set of participants looked at the same set of photos and rated each on a list of personal characteristics that included: attractiveness, maturity, competence, dominance, and warmth. This last characteristic, “warmth,” is a combination of likability and trustworthiness. Importantly, these participants had no idea that they were rating pictures of democratic and autocratic politicians.

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Among these traits, two stood out as distinguishing democratically elected politicians from authoritarian dictators. Both types of leaders bore features that suggested they were mature, competent, and dominant. And this makes sense because these are exactly the kinds of personality traits that are necessary for effective leadership.

Where the democrats and dictators differed, however, was in terms of attractiveness and warmth. By far, the democrats were judged as more attractive and warmer than the dictators.

As Giacomin and colleagues point out, this finding shouldn’t be surprising. After all, democratic elections are a form of popularity contest. And to be popular, you have to be good-looking and likable. Moreover, as an elected leader, you’re also expected to be trustworthy.

Conversely, attractiveness and warmth are not necessary characteristics for rising to the top of a Machiavellian political system. In fact, such personality features may even be detrimental to the goal of leading an authoritarian state. For instance, the tyrannical Roman emperor Caligula, when told that his people despised him, callously replied: “Let them hate me, so long as they fear me.” Rather than being “warm,” dictators need to be “cold”—calculating, ruthless, and violent—to rise to the top of a Machiavellian system and to stay there.

Evolved Mechanism?

The fact that people can make such rapid but fairly accurate judgments about various personal characteristics suggests an evolved mechanism—a cognitive heuristic for selecting leaders on the basis of facial appearance. In fact, the findings from the current study on discriminating democrats and dictators are in line with other research on the appearance of leadership.

For instance, CEOs of major corporations have facial features that are distinctive from military leaders, and these are distinct from sports leaders, such as team captains and coaches. This suggests that the evolved heuristic for selecting leaders is also responsive to circumstances.

However, cognitive mechanisms that may have evolved deep in our hunter-gatherer past may not be flexible enough to adjust to the demands of modern society. While facial features strongly predict who will be elected to political office or hired to head the board of directors, research also shows that they often do a poor job of predicting which leaders will actually be successful in their jobs. Perhaps we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover after all.