Abstract: Competence inference from facial appearance affects the social outcomes including political election and CEOs success. But the question that whether there are the facial competences for politicians and CEOs are in common or occupational specific remains unknown. Two studies were carried out to investigate this question. In Study 1, participants were asked to rate the competence of three types of face (politicians, CEOs and non-leaders) on a 9-point scale. The results showed that competence ratings of politicians and CEOs were higher than non-leaders, whereas there was no significant difference between these two groups. In Study 2, participants were asked to choose the face with higher competence from each pair of faces (CEO/politician face pairs, CEO/non-leader face pairs and politician/non-leader face pairs) under government situation and company situation separately. We found both the CEOs and politicians were selected more frequently than non-leaders under both of two situations. However, the results also showed that facial competence of politicians and CEOs were more prominent in their corresponding occupational situation. These results suggest that facial competence may be consisted of both general features and professional specific features for politicians and CEOs.

Key words: Competence, Face perception, Politician, CEO