Facial coding is not an exact science, and is only now starting to find business applications. It dates back to the 1960s when San Francisco psychologist Paul Ekman found that expressions are learned early and are the same in Japan and Argentina as they are in the USA.
Animators have embraced facial coding to make characters such as Shrek seem human. But imagine how facial coding might catch on if stock investors were able to determine if a CEO is fibbing about an earnings forecast. No one yet suggests that facial coding is anywhere near as reliable as a polygraph, but it could signal when a CEO says one thing while suppressing an emotion that says another.
So far on Wall Street such strategies have barely moved ahead of palm reading as an investment strategy. That might be changing. A paper called “The Face of Success” published in February’s issue of the journal Psychological Science found that students who looked at photographs of Fortune 1,000 CEOs were able to identify the most successful.
They knew nothing about the executives before looking at the photos, but used naive judgments to rate them on traits such as competence, dominance, likability and trustworthiness, says co-author Nicholas Rule, a psychology professor at Tufts University.
It is presidential season and Hill, president of Sensory Logic and author of a book about facial coding called Emotionomics: Winning Hearts and Minds, has been in demand to find clues in the faces of the candidates.
John McCain forces smiles and, true to his reputation, angers easily, as demonstrated by puffed cheeks and a chin thrust upward in disgust, Hill says. Hillary Clinton smirks, an expression “she oddly enough shares with President Bush,” which conveys an attitude of assurance bordering on superiority and smugness.
Barack Obama has the best true smile, but flashes it rarely for someone who speaks of hope, and Hill sees flashes of disdain, aloofness, disappointment and exasperation.
One reason investors may be slow to use facial coding is that it has been difficult or expensive to secure video of CEOs. But YouTube is changing that, and at USA TODAY’s request Hill took a break from politics to examine videos posted on YouTube of about a dozen well-known CEOs or chairmen. They averaged 42.5% positive expressions, which is slightly better than the 35% to 40% positive expressions among the 1,200 people studied by Sensory Logic the last two years
