I kept telling my friends that guy could never be elected president.
Never mind which guy. In fact, it doesn't matter, because I've said this more than once. It's my staple line when the dinner conversation turns to lists of candidates: he's too short, too skinny, too funny-looking. My friends never listened, secure (and correct) in the knowledge that they all know more about politics than I do. But I do know a little about the power of people's visual judgments. He'll never win, I said.
Now here comes Princeton professor Alexander Todorov to say I was right. His paper, "The Quarter-Second Election" will be in the October 22 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Unlike a lot of schools, Princeton writes readable press releases on social science research, so I have the luxury of letting them describe the experiment:
A split-second glance at two candidates' faces is often enough to determine which one will win an election, according to a Princeton University study.
Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov has demonstrated that quick facial judgments can accurately predict real-world election returns. Todorov has taken some of his previous research that showed that people unconsciously judge the competence of an unfamiliar face within a tenth of a second, and he has moved it to the political arena. His lab tests show that a rapid appraisal of the relative competence of two candidates' faces was sufficient to predict the winner in about 70 percent of the races for U.S. senator and state governor in the 2006 elections.
"We never told our test subjects they were looking at candidates for political office -- we only asked them to make a gut reaction response as to which unfamiliar face appeared more competent," said Todorov, an assistant professor of psychology and public affairs. "The findings suggest that fast, unreflective judgments based on a candidate's face can affect voting decisions."
Todorov and Charles Ballew, an undergraduate psychology major who graduated from Princeton in 2006, conducted three experiments in which several dozen participants had to make snap judgments about faces. Participants were shown a series of photos, each containing a pair of faces, and asked to choose, based purely on gut feeling, which face they felt displayed more competence. The differences among the experiments largely concerned the amounts of time an observer was allowed to view the faces – as brief as a tenth of a second or longer -- and to pass judgment afterward.
What was unknown to the participants in the third experiment was that the image pairs were actually the photographs of the two frontrunner candidates for a major election being held somewhere in the United States during the time of the experiment in late 2006. The races were either for state governor or for a seat in the U.S. Senate. In cases where an observer recognized either of the two faces, the researchers removed the selection from the data.
Two weeks later elections were held, and the researchers compared the competency judgments with the election results. They found that the judgments predicted the winners in 72.4 percent of the senatorial races and 68.6 percent of the gubernatorial races.
"This means that with a quick look at two photos, you have a great chance of predicting who will win," Todorov said. "Voters are not that rational, after all. So maybe we have to consider that when we elect our politicians."
[Read the rest here.]
This doesn't mean jurors make up their minds at the sight of your face, or your client's. Your interaction with jurors is more personal than a candidate's interaction with voters, for one thing. You have many more chances to get your evidence, your arguments, and your authentic personality across.
But this research does mean that physical appearance is a powerful force in shaping opinions and reactions, far more powerful than most people think it is. It's an issue that has come up before, and it's not going to go away.
(Photo by Daniel Lobo at http://www.flickr.com/photos/daquellamanera/73686445/; license details there.)
