Whose Face will be First?
N E W S R E L E A S E
For Immediate Release
October 29, 2008
Caltech-Led Researchers Find Negative Cues from Appearance Alone Matter for Real Elections
PASADENA, Calif.– Brain-imaging studies reveal that voting decisions
are more associated with the brain’s response to negative aspects of
a politician’s appearance than to positive ones, says a team of
researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech),
Scripps College, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa.
This appears to be particularly true when voters have little or no
information about a politician aside from their physical appearance.
The research was published online in the journal Social Cognitive and
Affective Neuroscience (http://scan.oxfordjournals.org) on October 28.
Deciding whom to trust, whom to fear, and indeed for whom to vote in
an election depends, in part, on quick, implicit judgments about
people’s faces. Although this general finding has been scientifically
documented, the detailed mechanisms have remained obscure. To probe
how a politician’s appearance might influence voting decisions,
Michael Spezio, an assistant professor of psychology at Scripps
College and visiting associate at Caltech, and Antonio Rangel, an
associate professor of economics at Caltech, examined brain
activation in subjects looking at the faces of real politicians.
Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner at the
Caltech Brain Imaging Center, the researchers obtained
high-resolution images of brain activation as volunteers made
decisions about politicians based solely on their pictures.
The researchers conducted two independent studies using different
groups of volunteers viewing the images of different politicians.
Volunteers were shown pairs of photos, each with a politician coupled
with their opponent in a real election in 2002, 2004, or 2006.
Importantly, none of the study subjects were familiar with the
politicians whose images they viewed.
In some experiments, the volunteers had to make character-trait
judgments about the politicians–for example, which of the two
politicians in the pair looked more competent to hold congressional
office, or which looked more likely to physically threaten the
volunteer. In other experiments, volunteers were asked to cast their
vote for one politician in the pair; once again, their decisions were
based only on the politicians’ appearances.
The results correlated with actual election outcomes. For example,
politicians who were thought to look the most physically threatening
in the experiment were more likely to have actually lost their
elections in real life. The correlation held true even when
volunteers saw the politicians’ pictures for less than one tenth of a
second.
Importantly, the pictures of politicians who lost elections, both in
the lab and in the real world, were associated with greater
activation in key brain areas known to be important for processing
emotion. This was true when volunteers simply voted and also when
they closely examined the politicians’ pictures for character traits.
The studies suggest that negative evaluations based only on a
politician’s appearance have some effect on real election
outcomes–and, specifically, may influence which candidate will lose
an election. This influence appears to be more uniform than the
influence exerted by positive evaluations based on appearance.
This finding fits with prior studies in cognitive neuroscience as
well as in political theory.
“The results from our two studies suggest that intangibles like a
candidate’s appearance may work preferentially, or more uniformly,
via negative motives, and by means of brain processing contributing
to such negative evaluations,” says Michael Spezio, the lead author
on the study.
“It’s important to note that the brain region most closely associated
with seeing pictures of election losers, known as the insula, is
known to be important in processing both negative and positive
emotional evaluations. Its increased activation in response to the
appearance of election losers is consistent with its association with
negative emotional evaluations in several domains, including the
sight of someone who looks disgusted or untrustworthy,” Spezio says.
“Candidates try to evoke emotional reactions when they campaign for
office, and this research gives us a new perspective on how much
emotions might matter, and how they might matter, in terms of how
voters view candidates,” says study coauthor R. Michael Alvarez, a
professor of political science at Caltech and codirector of the
Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.
One surprise in the study is that negative evaluations, such as the
perception that a candidate is threatening, influence election loss
significantly more than positive evaluations like attractiveness
influence election success.
“While these findings are certainly very provocative, it is important
to note their limitations,” says study senior author Ralph Adolphs,
Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and professor of
biology at Caltech, and director of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center.
In particular, Adolphs says, the observed effects, while
statistically significant, were rather small. “There is no doubt that
many, many sources of information come into play when we make
important and complex decisions, such as will happen in the upcoming
elections. We are not claiming that how the candidates look is all
there is to the story of how voters make up their minds–or that this
is even the biggest part of the story. However, we do think it has
some effect–and, moreover, that this effect may be largest when
voters know little else about a candidate.”
Adds Spezio, “Given the size of the effects we see, we are likely
detecting the influence of voters who have little or no information
about a candidate’s views or life story, for example, or who choose
not to pay attention to that information. Our finding is consistent
with literature showing that humans prioritize negative information
about outgroups”–groups of individuals who are perceived to not
belong to one’s own group, as defined by characteristics such as
profession, age, gender, social community, and shared values, but to
an outside group. “A voter who knows nothing about a candidate will
likely put that candidate into a default outgroup position. From
there, negative attributions are expected to get the primary weight
in decisionmaking. And that is precisely what we see,” he says.
“Earlier behavioral studies showed that rapid, effortless inferences
from facial appearance predict the outcomes of political elections,”
says study coauthor Alex Todorov, an assistant professor of
psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. In 2005,
Todorov published the first study to show that voter decisions are
significantly associated with character-trait judgments that are
based entirely on the visual appearance of political candidates.
“However,” Todorov adds, “these studies did not show how these
inferential processes could play out at the level of individual
voters. Two types of evidence will be critical to delineate the
causal effects of appearance on electoral success: work by political
scientists studying real voting decisions and work by cognitive
neuroscientists studying the proximal mechanisms of the effects of
inferences on decisions. The fMRI studies are an important step in
the latter direction.”
The coauthors of the study, titled, “A neural basis for the effect of
candidate appearance on election outcomes,” are John O’Doherty,
associate professor of psychology at Caltech, Kyle Mattes of the
University of Iowa, and Hackjin Kim of Korea University.
The work was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the
National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.
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