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What kind of personality do you need to run a big company successfully? Does it take trustworthiness, charisma, dominance or what?

Short answer: we're still finding out. But here's something we now do know: amazingly, people can judge the success of a chief executive just by looking at his (or, occasionally, her) face.

Psychologists have so far been unable to establish evidence of any direct relationship between chief executive officers' personality traits - such as competence, dominance, likeability and trustworthiness - and the success of the companies they head.

There is, however, mounting evidence that the first impressions people form are often surprisingly accurate.

Studies have shown we are good at predicting how capable particular teachers will be and how well particular political candidates will do.

So how do we go at predicting the success of CEOs just from their appearance? Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady, of Tufts University in Massachusetts, sought to find out. The results of their study are reported in Psychological Science.

They picked photos of the CEOs of the 25 highest- and 25 lowest-ranked companies in Fortune magazine's list of the top 1000 United States companies. Each photo was in black and white, the same size and cropped tightly round the CEO's head.

Then 100 college students were asked to examine the photos. Half were asked to give each face a rating on a seven-point scale for five personality traits, including "facial maturity". The other half were asked simply to assess "how good would this person be at leading a company?".

These subjective ratings were then compared with the size of each CEO's company's profits but not before certain factors were controlled.

For instance, it's well established that good-looking people are regarded with special favour in many of the judgments people make, so the possibility of "beauty bias" was taken into account. As well, allowance was made for differences in age.

The first finding was that chief executives who rated highly on personality traits associated with power (competence, dominance and facial maturity) tended to be in charge of companies with high profits.

But CEOs who rated highly on personality traits associated with personal warmth (likeability and trustworthiness) didn't tend to be in charge of companies with high profits.

The second finding was that CEOs who rated highly on the question about looking like a good leader did, indeed, tend to be in charge of companies with high profits.

Surprisingly, however, there was no correlation between CEOs who rated strongly on perceived power and those who rated strongly on perceived leadership ability. So a CEO is rarely perceived to be both powerful and a great leader, but either characteristic tends to be associated with greater success.

This finding that people can make a reasonably accurate guess at a chief executive's successfulness just by glancing at his photo is all the more striking when you remember that the CEOs in the study were a quite homogeneous group. All of them were male, Caucasian-looking and of similar ages.

Of course, the other thing to remember is that we're dealing here with correlation, not causation. We can't tell whether more successful companies choose individuals with a particular appearance to be their CEOs - a distinct possibility - or whether individuals with a particular appearance emerge as more successful in their work as CEOs.

Another point to remember is that the study's test of success was the absolute size of the company's profits, not the rate of increase in profits during the particular CEO's period in charge. So to some extent what we're measuring is the ability to tell who can get a job as the CEO of a big company, which may not be the same thing as who can grow profits fastest.

Even so, the human ability to make snap judgments about people on (obviously) limited information, and yet get them right more often than not, is remarkable.

We have so much more fascinating stuff to learn about how humans - and business people - tick.