Based on the candidate’s face analysis, scientists can make quite accurate predictions about the leader’s favorite voters.
Faces greatly influence society’s judgments about a person, including in elections, scientists say. Voters tend to vote for candidates who look talented, trustworthy, old, attractive, and familiar.
George Washington (left) and Abraham Lincoln (right) have distinctive faces. (Photo: YouTube).
George Washington knows the advantage of his forehead. He believes it would be better if the forehead looked higher and wider. To emphasize this feature, he often combs his hair back and ties it back, completing his masculine look with curls and a ribbon.
Scientific research shows that a politician’s face greatly affects the vote rate , even many voters may not realize this.
Psychologists have long known that first impressions are important. For example, people often consider people with deer eyes and thick lips to be trustworthy, while people with big faces are often aggressive.
These judgments are unconscious , involuntary, and happen at lightning speed, possibly in as little as 33 milliseconds. “People say about our studies like this: ‘It’s so weird, I barely noticed it was a face,'” says Alexander Todorov, a psychologist at Princeton University.
First impressions are powerful and form very quickly. (Photo: Entrepreneur).
People often expect CEOs or soldiers to have strong faces, while caregivers should have cute faces. If you have the right face, your chances of getting hired and developing a favorable career will be higher.
Judgments and prejudices also influence politics. Before voting, voters often judge a candidate’s talent, but it is worth noting that they have these judgments through the faces of those who will be voted.
The influence of a candidate’s face on voters is so strong that psychologists correctly predicted the election results in the US, Bulgaria, France, Australia, Mexico, Finland, Japan, the percentage of votes in Upper The US House of Representatives, the US House of Representatives, and state governor elections are solely attributed to these characteristics.
Volunteers who participated in the studies knew absolutely nothing about the candidates. They only looked at portraits and were asked to rate each person’s ability. This method can be used to predict the outcome of foreign elections and is effective whether asking the elderly or children.
“Many good candidates have a much lower chance of being elected just because of their looks,” said Gabriel Lenz, a political scientist from the University of California.
The fact that the face affects the public’s perception of the ability of a leader appeared thousands of years ago. The ancients called the method of assessing personality through the face the art of seeing .
Cyrus the Great’s nose became the standard for many generations to come. (Photo: Arhivurokov).
Cyrus the Great, the founder of the first Persian Empire, possessed a long, slightly hooked and pointed nose. This nose became the royal standard for many generations to come. Only those with similar characteristics are given high rank. The young men even tied their own noses in the hope that it would grow long and hooked like that.
First impressions are often wrong, but everyone has very similar impressions. “They’re very consistent, even across thousands of people,” says Jon Freeman, a psychologist at New York University.
Voters tend to vote for politicians who look good, trustworthy, old, attractive, and familiar. In an election, candidates with such faces are more likely to win.
Many of these features are obvious, but what a good-looking face is is more difficult to explain. In 2010, Todorov and expert Christopher Olivola from Carnegie Mellon University conducted a study to better understand this.
First, they instruct the computer on the physical characteristics of a good leader by randomly generating faces and asking volunteers to rate the performance of these “fake” candidates. They then used the information to create new faces, some of which were edited to look really good.
British Prime Minister Theresa May is one of the few female leaders. (Photo: The Triangle).
Gradually, the team discovered basic changes such as: the distance between the eyebrows and eyes narrowed, the face became less round, the cheekbones were raised, and the jaw was more angular. Faces that look good are the most attractive, mature, and manly faces. “You may find it a bit uncomfortable because this is sexist. People favor male faces,” Todorov said.
Whether these biases are innate or learned remains a mystery. Freeman is more inclined to the second possibility, that is, the concept of a good leader’s appearance is formed in the process of interacting with society. The current US government is 80% male, the average age in the House of Representatives is 57.8 and the Senate is 61.8, according to the BBC. There are only 9 leaders under the age of 40 in the world and 15 are women.
But if these notions are not innate, they can also change. ” The more women succeed in leadership positions, for example in the UK, the more people can change their minds,” says Todorov.
Austrian Chancellor-elect Sebastian Kurz is only 31 years old. (Photo: 6abc).
Many young leaders can also contribute to changing the view that good people have to look old. French President Emmanuel Macron is 39 years old this year, while Sebastian Kurz, the future Austrian prime minister, becomes Europe’s youngest leader at the age of 31.
However, some other biased thoughts are more difficult to eradicate. Psychological research shows that people tend to like familiar things, such as their own face.
In 2006, psychologists from Stanford University conducted a mock election. The research team showed the students photos of the candidates and asked to vote. However, it is actually an edited portrait photo, a mixture of the candidate’s face and the students themselves that they do not know. As a result, students favor candidates who look more like them.
In addition to the familiar face effect , politicians with the most attractive faces also benefit from TV appearances, especially with voters who do not have broad knowledge. “Even if the public tries to avoid political issues, they are still affected,” Lenz said.