The Teddy Bear Effect | Hacker News Reader

The Teddy Bear Effect

harvardmagazine.com

49 pointshelloworld29 comments

It's a very interesting hypothesis, but I hope that either the journalist misinterpreted the study, or I misinterpreted the journalist with

> In fact, he found that the more cherubic a black CEO’s face, the higher his salary—and even his company’s revenues.

I hope the study controlled for firm revenues when evaluating the effect of facial features on salary. It's difficult to both simultaneously control for revenues and also attribute causation on revenues. I can imagine several plausible mechanisms (maybe a teddy bear face reduces power struggles within the C-suite) by which the face affects revenue and this in turn drives salary. I have no doubt that the salary differences remain after controlling for revenues, and there's some bidirectional causality, but the journalist's phrasing suggests to me a direction of causality that may not be warranted.

I am light skinned and look much younger than my age. I have noticed over the years that I seem to not be allowed anywhere near any kind of management role. Although I will be trusted with great responsibility to actually research, develop, build and deliver, I have not generally been allowed to define projects or suggest strategy. I am either at the sharp end or nowhere, it seems. I suspect that my only way to be anywhere near being in an executive position is if I start my own business.

edit - of course it might be nothing to do with appearance, I definitely have some negative character traits. Though if it is character traits, very similar traits don't seem to hurt the men with stubble and prominent chin clefts in their careers.

Without knowing more, in your shoes, I'd take a hard look and see if I were too agreeable. If you're technically respected, but not getting enough influence, it's possible that you're not aggressive enough. My understanding is that assertiveness training can help with that.

Thanks for this. I guess there is a fine line to tread between being aggressive and assertive. I often see them used interchangeably though.

Start by being a leader without being a manager (manager are made from leaders in individual contributor roles), ask for stretch assignments when some leader is OOF, ask for shadowing to a respected middle manager and ask for advice. And final piece of advice, ask point blank (not aggressively): What do you think I need to be a manager? What do you think I’m missing.

Thanks for the advice. I think also some of it might just be that I have mainly had jobs for smaller companies which have a relatively small percentage of management positions available compared to larger organisations. So as they tend to only have a handful of people in the middle between the executives and everybody else, there are just less management positions there to start with and they tend to either go to the existing friends of the executives or professional managers hired from outside.

This doesn’t seem surprising, given the reverse has long been known - in any supposed meritocracy, height, a deep voice, facial hair all tend to correlate with (or cause?) authority. I’ve experienced that personally - I look older than I am, so people look to me for advice even before they establish my credentials or competency.

I'd be interested in also seeing the the boards of directors who hired the CEOs. That would enrich the conversation.

>He says some people misunderstand the aim of his research; he doesn’t suggest that African Americans undergo plastic surgery to look more baby-faced, or wear glasses if they have 20/20 vision, or make an effort to speak softly. He’s not warning mature-looking black men away from C-suite roles. “I think we should focus on dismantling the hierarchical structures and systems that keep people out and produce phenomena like the Teddy Bear Effect,” he explains. “I want people to realize that we don’t live in a meritocracy, that we are judged by different standards. A quality that could be an asset in one group could be a liability in another.” And because people make many choices and decisions “outside of awareness, intent, or control,” prompted by cues they often don’t notice consciously, Livingston says it might be helpful to change hiring and promotion practices to avoid such blind spots involving physical appearance.

And how did he come to the conclusion that these effects and psychological biases are undesirable and we should find mechanisms to avoid them? The journalist either skipped it, or Livingston jumped to state his opinion without explaining himself.

I could also interpret the data presented in the completely opposite way: these psychological biases have helped us choose people more apt for these positions and we should create an AI that chooses people based on these facial characteristics, but well, as long as I don't provide a rationale, I'm just spewing bullshit, as the second part of this article does.

I'm sorry for the diatribe, but I'm a little tired of these articles trying to push their political agenda.

> I could also interpret the data presented in the completely opposite way: these psychological biases have helped us choose people more apt for these positions.

You mean that baby-like facial features do actually make black men more competent in decision-making roles?

sandov is saying that the data presented in the article could be interpreted that way. I don't think sandov is actually advocating for that interpretation.

I'm not voicing agreement with your parent comment, but for a better understanding more data is needed than just broad correlations. Without additional information you cannot accurately pinpoint where causalities begin and end as well as why and how they exist to begin with.

As long as people perceive a stimulus in a certain way (even if they have no rational reason to), it will have an effect that cannot easily be removed. The decisions that a CEO makes are important, but how others perceive them are also important to the very end, not just in the hiring or promotions processes.

> As long as people perceive a stimulus in a certain way (even if they have no rational reason to), it will have an effect that cannot easily be removed. The decisions that a CEO makes are important, but how others perceive them are also important to the very end, not just in the hiring or promotions processes.

Yup, this is plausible. It's also compatible with what the author says: “I want people to realize that we don’t live in a meritocracy, that we are judged by different standards. A quality that could be an asset in one group could be a liability in another.”

Unless of course you define meritocracy to include being on the right side of people's biases. The problem with this definition is that it is close to making every promotion decision meritocratic by definition.

>The problem with this definition is that it is close to making every promotion decision meritocratic by definition.

This is pretty close to what Michael Young was warning about when he coined the term in his 1958 satire, 'The Rise of the Meritocracy'. Here's an article by him on the subject - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

I'm not saying that, because I can't provide a rationale or an argument based on actual data.

But the article doesn't provide a rationale or data to back up its thesis either.

So, both claims are equally ridiculous.

I think it's pretty uncontroversial, especially within STEM, to assert that we should not judge people by their visual appearance.

I guess this is true only to a point; perhaps there was an implicit "we should not judge people by the appearance they were born with"?

E.g. if someone shows up to work in dirty clothes and unkempt hair, everyone judges them by that, and their boss might even say explicitly "this is not acceptable".

I think we mostly agree that this is OK?

Another confounder is that we all have subconscious drivers. E.g. I really enjoy Jason Statham in bad action movies, and I cut him more slack simply because of his visual appearance (his style). We all do exactly the same with a leader which our subconscious approves of, and we are more inclined to do a good job under such a leader.

If a certain trait of a certain subgroup is something that's frequently featured in people's subconscious idea of a good leader, those traits will neccessarily correlate with better leaders.

Okay sure, but the article is about biological appearance mostly, with some more social-driven (or interpreted as such) factors like glasses.

Who is "we"?

As a random citizen walking around the streets I shouldn't decide people are more or less likely to attack me or whatever based on appearance.

If I'm a casting director for a movie, I should definitely take it in to consideration.

The author though doesn't address their recommendations to random citizens or casting directors though. Rather to the board that are hiring CEO's.

The article doesn't cover whether their appearance findings are causal or not in any way, or the importance of social justice over profit. Just straight "found a thing people seem to care about so they should immediately stop caring about it". I dunno if this is what the original poster meant by "not providing rationale" but I felt like the conclusion to the article sort of came out of nowhere.

> Who is "we"?

> As a random citizen walking around the streets I shouldn't decide people are more or less likely to attack me or whatever based on appearance.

Unless you have a deep knowledge of the neighborhood you are walking in, this fits the dictionary definition of prejudice.

> If I'm a casting director for a movie, I should definitely take it in to consideration.

If you haven't been paying attention, casting directors have been accused of discriminating against marginalized groups with casting decisions they made based on actors' appearances.

> The author though doesn't address their recommendations to random citizens or casting directors though. Rather to the board that are hiring CEO's.

> The article doesn't cover whether their appearance findings are causal or not in any way, or the importance of social justice over profit. Just straight "found a thing people seem to care about so they should immediately stop caring about it". I dunno if this is what the original poster meant by "not providing rationale" but I felt like the conclusion to the article sort of came out of nowhere.

Well, the root of this thread is accusing the posted article of proselytizing a "political agenda" by using a study's data to surmise that racial minorities are being discriminated against because of how they look. The post you are replying to is using some type of rhetorical device to argue that it is generally ridiculous to discriminate against people based on their looks. Given this context, I doubt you will find the recommendations you are looking for here.

Did you choose the specific term "decision-making roles" with intent?

Decision making is one aspect of being an executive not the whole thing.

> these psychological biases have helped us choose people more apt for these positions

{citation needed}

There's a ton of data out there about diversity's impact on businesses, actually. First google hit: [1].

Your AI will choose white men 95% of the time, on account of them being white men. Numerous studies have looked at discriminatory hiring practices, and observe that more-qualified candidates are often overlooked due to racial and gender bias. We agree that hiring less-qualified candidates is less desirable, don't we?

> I'm sorry for the diatribe, but I'm a little tired of these articles trying to push their political agenda.

Really? What's political about this? Gotta say, you sound like a climate denier whining about the political agenda of climate scientists. The common "agenda" here is to make the world a more survivable place for more people.

[1] https://medium.com/awaken-blog/compilation-of-diversity-incl...

> you sound like a climate denier whining

Please don't respond to a bad comment with another one, e.g. by going into personal attack or introducing an extraneous flamewar topic. This is in the site guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>how did he come to the conclusion that these effects and psychological biases are undesirable and we should find mechanisms to avoid them

Given your desire that others provide you with strong evidence for visual biases in hiring being at all damaging, otherwise you will dismiss them as pushing a political agenda, perhaps you might be a perfect volunteer for the following proposal.

In this spirit of hard nosed logical inquiry, are you at all interested in helping the British Medical Journal with their double blind parachute study? https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459

You're right that there are a lot of suppositions being made in the interpretation of the data. But which seems more likely: that all the best leadership skills among black men are concentrated among those who look the most infantile, or that things are run by white people and there's racism and stuff?

There's absolutely no doubt that between the two options of "facial features are assigned at absolute random, but white male racists control the world" and "facial features are determined by developmental processes that also impact behavior," the former is closer to what is typically believed. However what distinguishes science (ideally) from online comments is that every reasonable hypotheses is supposed to be addressed, including the ones we all agree are pretty far from the present consensus. The accusation that hypothesis are pre-selected based on what is already believed is presently the most dangerous weapon used against the social relevance of the soft sciences, so in today's climate it is especially important to not actually do it.

Are you advocating for phrenology-based hiring practices?

... and 95% are white men, definitely the square jaws and gray hair, make good leaders. Or is a case of perpetuating the status quo.

Is there anything that anybody can do right to make anyone happy about racial differences?

Can anyone not break the eggshells? Maybe what we need to do is just keep dumping money into this problem, until there’s no more money left?

Then everyone gets to sing Bodak Yellow, act like Cardi B, Queen of the fucking universe no matter how beautiful or ugly, smart or dumb they might just coincidentally be. That way, everyone is just born perfect and circumstances have no affect on our lives.

Don’t gotta dance, wear red bottom shoes, you can get ‘em both, you don’t gotta choose.

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