Vanessa Van Edwards describes Anthony Little's study where participants picked the more powerful-looking face in pairs of altered presidential candidates. They consistently chose the actual election winners without knowing who they were, suggesting humans instinctively read power from facial features alone.
Research has found that there is a look of power. And this is one of the most fascinating experiments I've ever read. It was done by researcher Anthony Little. So what he did is he took 8 presidential races. And he took the faces of each candidate. And he modified the faces so they were unrecognizable, but they still carried the same facial features. For example, here's an image of George W. Bush and John Kerry. Now, you can't recognize them as George W. Bush or John Kerry. You can see they have the same facial features. So he took these photos and he asked participants to pick the more powerful face. He did this with 8 different presidential races. And he found that in all 8 races, participants picked the winner of the actual election without knowing who that face was supposed to be. There is a look to a powerful face, and somehow instinctively we're able to decide or choose a more powerful face simply based on facial features alone.
