Macho men not always aggressive, uncoopeative: Study

Men with broad face are typically portrayed as "bad to the bone", but a new study has found the macho guys are not always cold and aggressive, and can be surprisingly cooperative.

In fact, the wider-faced men are more likely to sacrifice for their team, and the findings suggest that people's first impressions of macho men -- that they are uncooperative, cold and even dishonest -- aren't so accurate, researchers said.

"Men with wider faces have typically been portrayed as 'bad to the bone,'" study author Michael Stirrat of St Andrews University in the UK was quoted as saying by LiveScience.

According to the researchers, exposure to higher levels of testosterone in the womb may bestow men with more "masculine" faces, manifesting in prominent jawlines and small eyes. These differences become clear at puberty, when testosterone levels rise in boys and their faces mature.

Because testosterone is associated with aggression, some research has linked wide faces with the kind of guy who is always spoiling for a fight.

But, Stirrat and his team suspected the story might not be that simple. They gave students money to play a group game in which they could either freeload off other players or risk their money to benefit the group as a whole.

Half of the students were told that their winnings would be compared with the winnings of other groups. The others were told that their winnings would be compared with the winnings of groups from Edinburgh University, a rival school.

The wider a man's face, the less likely he was to cooperate with his group when told that he'd be compared with other men from his school. But when given an outside rival, these broad-faced macho guys got competitive.

Suddenly, they became more likely than average to gamble their own money for the good of their group.

The results, published online May 23 in the journal Psychological Science, show that masculine traits can come out in both pro-social and anti-social ways. In other words, macho guys may be more aggressive in general, but they are also warm-and-fuzzy in some circumstances, such as when they need to support the home team.

The finding bolsters a 2011 research that found that wide-faced CEOs tend to lead better-performing companies than their narrow-faced counterparts.     Perhaps these macho CEOs are more willing to sacrifice for their team, the researchers suggested.