Want to dominate a negotiation? Go wide.
New research finds that men with wide faces tend to take a more competitive approach to negotiations than do their counterparts with smaller facial width-to-height ratios, helping them claim a bigger slice of the proverbial pie in negotiations that have obvious winners and losers. (That’s good news for at least one Dick Tracy villain.)
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, London Business School and Columbia University conducted a series of simulated male-male negotiations in real estate transactions and salaries–often considered zero-sum deals–and found that men with wider faces entered these negotiations with a competitive, rather than cooperative, mindset.
Past studies have linked large facial width-to-height ratios to aggressive, self-interested and even unethical behavior. (They are also seen as ideal partners for romantic flings but not so much for long-term relationships.)
In one experiment with a 60-person sample, men with wider faces negotiated a signing bonus of about $2,200 more than the bonus won by men with narrower faces. In another simulation involving 46 men, a property went for a higher price when the wide-faced participant was the seller, and a lower price when that person was the buyer.
However, the researchers found that when a situation calls for compromise and creative solutions—say, when one party’s ceiling price is lower than the other’s absolute floor and alternative concessions might be needed—wide-faced men don’t fare so well.
This newest paper will run in a forthcoming issue of The Leadership Quarterly.
Michael Haselhuhn, an assistant professor of management at UC Riverside and lead author of the study, says the latest findings are consistent with prior research on attributes associated with wide-faced males and could have implications for how all men–no matter their face shape–enter negotiations. For example, a narrow-faced man can anticipate a more contentions exchange if he knows his counterpart’s noggin is a little wider, while men with broader features can tweak their own approaches if they expect to be perceived as more aggressive from the outset.
Haselhuhn says his own face falls somewhere in the middle, neither particularly wide nor especially narrow. So how does he fare at the bargaining table? “I tend to let my wife negotiate,” he says.