Facial coding, the idea that your expression gives away what you are really thinking, was put forth some 40 years ago by psychologist Paul Ekman . But does it work in business? Can you tell what CEOs really think, just by looking, or are they so carefully trained that they can hide things from investors? USA Today took YouTube videos of nine prominent CEOs and had a facial coding expert named Dan Hill examine them. He rated Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Michael Dell (Dell), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), Phil Knight (Nike), Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.) and Donald Trump (Trump).
Buffett, Gates and Knight scored the best, which seems to boil down to they smiled the most. The worst performer? Ellison, who may have been having a bad hair day. Murdoch and Trump, the two CEOs who would seem to be most media-savvy, got the next lowest ratings.
Of course, what matters is not how they come across in an interview — those can give anybody a sourpuss — but whether facial coding might be a quick-and-dirty lie detector test in meetings or investor sessions. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence to prove it, at least not yet. The article, It’s Written All Over Their Faces, notes that
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the State Department, military interrogators and the Transportation Security Administration pumped a lot of research money into facial coding. It could prove to be a lucrative investment tool, Ekman says, but that can’t be determined until someone puts up $500,000 to $1.5 million to fund a research project so that CEOs’ faces can be videotaped and analyzed today, then compared with financial reports and other information that becomes public a few months later. So far, no one has wanted to put up the money, even though facial coding may be more applicable to investing than it is to national security. Facial coding is too imperfect to stop 100% of bomb plots, Ekman says, but there could be fortunes to be made by venture capitalists who gain a 10% edge.
For now, facial coding offers only food for thought, especially to those who believe the value of hunches.
Here are two other articles that look at facial expressions and other ways that seem to shape social contacts, both from Geoffrey James:
Building Rapport at First Contact and Believe in Yourself, Believe What You Sell
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