Running for Office? You Better Look the Part

Got plans on being the next big thing in politics?  You gotta look the part.

An article in the latest Time, elaborating on research published in the American Journal of Political Science, discusses how people infer vitally important personality traits about a candidate from the face alone.  What traits?  The ones that tend to matter in elections, such as competence, honesty, trustworthiness, intelligence, etc.

And yes, there is a knowledge angle.  Here's a graph from the Time piece:

They combined data about voters in the 2006 elections—including their vote choice, political knowledge and TV exposure—with data about the candidates' faces, specifically ratings people gave about how "competent" the candidates were based on looks alone. All told, they analyzed 35 gubernatorial races and 29 Senate races, and they found that "low-knowledge individuals" who watched above-average amounts of TV were about six times more likely to vote for the more competent-looking person than those who watched little TV. They were also much more susceptible than those who had "high-knowledge" of politics. (The Onion headline for this rather unsurprising find would likely read "Ignorant Couch Potatoes Less Likely To Make Thoughtful Decisions.")

Those of you steeped in persuasion or processing theories such as the Elaboration Likelihood Model will of course not be surprised by the findings.  "Low-knowledge individuals" tend to be those who are less motivated and less able to deal with information, so they're more likely to use shortcuts to make sense of politics. In social science we call these heurstics, or cues.  Basically, they make life easier for those who either don't care or aren't able to deeply consider a situation or issue (or here, a candidate).

 

As the authors say in their abstract: "we find that appealing-looking politicians benefit disproportionately from television exposure, primarily among less knowledgeable individuals."

 

All I can say is it's a good thing I didn't go into politics.  Got a face for radio, and a voice for newspapers.

 

Driven to Distraction

Sexy News Babes
Drive Male Viewers
to Distraction

Okay, I wrote the above to grab the attention of those all-important bots that surf the net and end up driving people this direction.  But apparently it's true, at least according to this news story about research published in Communication Research (a fine journal because, if for no other reason, I've never appeared in it).  An experiment used two primary conditions: one in which a broadcast female news reader wore a tight jacket and skirt that, and I'm not making this up, "accented her waist-to-hip ratio."  In the alternate version, the same woman wore "a shapeless and loose-fitting" jacket and skirt.  In the previous, lipstick and a necklace, in the latter, neither of them.

According to the story (I've not read the journal article):

The researchers found the men recalled “significantly more information watching the unsexualized anchor deliver news than her sexualized version.” For women, the opposite was true, but the effect was far less pronounced.

And yet again, research I wish I had done.

We've all heard about news babes, which demeans hard-working women struggling to make it in journalism, but there's a significant grain of truth to it as well.  You don't see a lot of ugly women -- or men -- reading the news.  But apparently this gets in the way of learning, which isn't surprising.  We've known since research in the 1950s that humor or other factors can get in the way of learning.  We can only process so much.  There was even the infamous Reagan case in which his PR folks didn't care what the TV reporters said, as long as their visuals got on the screen. 

Attractiveness does have positives: it makes a person seem more believable and may even aid in persuasion, or so suggests persuasion models such as the Elaboration Likelihood Model. 

So our takeaway?  The story says it best:  "The study provides evidence for a basic theory of evolutionary psychology: When it comes to processing information, visual tends to trump verbal."