Day 35: New data reveal ‘looks’ bias at election time

In most election years, my Mom and I prefer the same candidate. There have been notable exceptions. One year, my Mom hemmed and hawed when I asked her to explain why she wasn’t rooting for “my guy.” Finally, she came out with it: “Can you imagine looking at that ugly mug for four years?”

For my Mom, that year, it came down to looks. Shallow? Maybe. But appearance may underlie the success of more elected leaders than you’d think. 

John Antonakis and Olaf Dalgas, from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, have a new paper out in this week’s issue of Science suggesting that both children and adults seem to look for one important thing in a leader — an appealing face.

An example of a pair of faces researchers used from the Meurthe-et-Moselle electoral district (number 1). Jean-Jacques Denis (left) lost to Laurent Hénart (right). Image © Science/AAAS

Antonakis and Dalgas used photos of two candidates (the winner and runner-up) from a past election in France and showed them to adults in Switzerland who didn’t know anything about the election. When asked to rate the two candidates’ competence based on the photos, most of the volunteers selected the winning candidate. The researchers then repeated the experiment with a group of children who had just finished playing a game involving a computer-simulated trip from Troy to Ithaca. The children were asked to select which of the two individuals they would choose to be the captain of their boat, and their choices were indistinguishable from the adults.

Although it’s unclear precisely what aspects of a person’s facial appearance indicate competence or leadership, the authors note that young children and even infants classify adults (and other children) based on their facial appearance. These new findings suggest that adults are using the same type of facial-inference scheme that children do when inferring competence of leaders. 

“These findings suggest,” the authors write, “that voters are not appropriately weighting performance-based information on political candidates when undertaking one of democracy’s most important civic duties.”