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Facial Width-to-Height Ratio (fWHR) has been linked with dominant and aggressive behavior in human males. We show here that on portrait photographs published online, chief executive officers (CEOs) of companies listed in the Dow Jones stock market index and the Deutscher Aktienindex have a higher-than-normal fWHR, which also correlates positively with their company’s donations to charitable causes and environmental awareness. Furthermore, we show that leaders of the world’s most influential non-governmental organizations and even the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, the popes, have higher fWHR compared to controls on public portraits, suggesting that the relationship between displayed fWHR and leadership is not limited to profit-seeking organizations. The data speak against the simplistic view that wider-faced men achieve higher social status through antisocial tendencies and overt aggression, or the mere signaling of such dispositions. Instead they suggest that high fWHR is linked with high social rank in a more subtle fashion in both competitive as well as prosocially oriented settings.
Reciprocal exchanges can be understood as the updating of an initial belief about a partner. This initial level of trust is essential when it comes to establishing cooperation with an unknown partner, as cooperation cannot arise without a minimum of trust not justified by previous successful exchanges with this partner. Here we demonstrate the existence of a representation of the initial trust level before an exchange with a partner has occurred. Specifically, we can predict the Investor’s initial investment—i.e. his initial level of trust toward the unknown trustee in Round 1 of a standard 10-round Trust Game—from resting-state functional connectivity data acquired several minutes before the start of the Trust Game. Resting-state functional connectivity is, however, not significantly associated with the level of trust in later rounds, potentially mirroring the updating of the initial belief about the partner. Our results shed light on how the initial level of trust is represented. In particular, we show that a person’s initial level of trust is, at least in part, determined by brain electrical activity acquired well before the beginning of an exchange.