Looking Too Old? How an Older Age Appearance Reduces Chances of Being Hired
| Author | Sabine Sczesny,Franciska Krings,Michèle Céline Kaufmann |
| Date | 01 October 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12125 |
| Published date | 01 October 2016 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 27, 727–739 (2016)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12125
Looking Too Old? How an Older Age
Appearance Reduces Chances of Being
Hired
Mich`
ele C´
eline Kaufmann, Franciska Krings1and Sabine Sczesny
University of Bern, Department of Psychology, Fabrikstrasse 8, 3012 Bern, Switzerland, and
1University of Lausanne
Corresponding author email: michele.kaufmann@psy.unibe.ch
Building on theories of impression formation based on faces, this researchinvestigates the
impact of job candidates’ facial age appearance on hiring as well as the underlying mech-
anism. In an experiment, participants decided whether to hire a fictitious candidate aged
50 years, 30 yearsor without age information. The candidate’s age was signalled either via
chronological information (variedby date of birth) or via facial age appearance (varied by
a photograph on the r´
esum´
e). Findings showed that candidates with older-appearing faces
– but not chronologically older candidates – triggered impressions of low health and fit-
ness, compared to younger-appearing candidates. These impressions reducedperceptions
of person–job fit, which loweredhiring probabilities for older-appearing candidates. These
findings provide the first evidence that trait impressions from faces are a determinant of
age discrimination in personnel selection. They call for an extension of currentmodels of
age discrimination by integrating the eects of face-based trait impressions, particularly
with respect to health and fitness.
Introduction
Recently, as the older population is dramatically
increasing in western societies, age has become
a major topic (e.g. European Commission, 2012;
US Census Bureau, 2001). Among other things,
it leads to a more age-diversified workforce, a de-
velopment that raises concerns about age-based
discrimination in personnel selection. Experimen-
tal research has shown that this is indeed a press-
ing issue: younger workers are evaluated as more
competent and are more frequently hired than
older ones, even when qualifications are equal (see
Gordon and Arvey (2004) for a meta-analysis of
the findings).
The present research was funded by the Stiftung Suzanne
und Hans Bi¨
asch zur F¨
orderung der Angewandten Psy-
chologie (grant number 2011-28) and by the Swiss Na-
tional Science Foundation(grant number 100014 156527
/1).
Age discrimination models often assume that
discrimination is driven by stereotypes of older
workers – by mostly negative beliefs about older
workers’ competence, eciency and motivation
(Perry, Kulik and Bourhis, 1996; Posthuma and
Campion, 2009; Shore and Goldberg, 2005). Re-
cent models suggest that stereotypes can be ac-
tivated by knowing a person’s age but also by
sensory cues in the face, voice and body. Sen-
sory cues, particularly from the face, lead to infer-
ences concerning the person’s traits and thus in-
fluence how he or she is perceived (Bodenhausen
and Macrae, 2006; Freeman and Ambady, 2011;
Zebrowitz, 2006). Trait impressions derived from
younger faces dier from those derived from older
faces (Zebrowitz et al., 2013, 2014). Therefore,
trait impressions triggered by older- and younger-
appearing faces – largely neglected in models and
empirical studies of age discrimination – are the
starting point for our research. We investigate
the impact of facial age appearance (FAA) on
© 2015 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
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