General Discussion

SoCalDem

(103,856 posts) Mon May 7, 2012, 08:29 PM May 2012

Your Political Party: Written on Your Face...(not new, but still valid)

http://www.good.is/post/your-political-party-written-on-your-face/

Your face says a lot about you. It says some obvious stuff (your age, gender, and race, for example, are usually apparent by the way your face looks), but people can also glean other information from your mug—like your political party.

A recent study at Tufts took a bunch of undergraduates, showed them pictures of Democrat and Republican candidates from the 2004 and 2006 Senate elections, and asked them to guess each politician's political party. To eliminate any racial bias (people might think a black politician had to be a Democrat) they eliminated racial minority politicians.

The result? They found that the students' guesses were much better than chance. They also found that the students were good at guessing the political party affiliation of other students based on pictures of their faces.

link to study quoted
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008733

Nicholas O. Rule*, Nalini Ambady

Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, United States of America
Abstract Top
Background

Individuals' faces communicate a great deal of information about them. Although some of this information tends to be perceptually obvious (such as race and sex), much of it is perceptually ambiguous, without clear or obvious visual cues.
Methodology/Principal Findings

Here we found that individuals' political affiliations could be accurately discerned from their faces. In Study 1, perceivers were able to accurately distinguish whether U.S. Senate candidates were either Democrats or Republicans based on photos of their faces. Study 2 showed that these effects extended to Democrat and Republican college students, based on their senior yearbook photos. Study 3 then showed that these judgments were related to differences in perceived traits among the Democrat and Republican faces. Republicans were perceived as more powerful than Democrats. Moreover, as individual targets were perceived to be more powerful, they were more likely to be perceived as Republicans by others. Similarly, as individual targets were perceived to be warmer, they were more likely to be perceived as Democrats.
Conclusions/Significance

These data suggest that perceivers' beliefs about who is a Democrat and Republican may be based on perceptions of traits stereotypically associated with the two political parties and that, indeed, the guidance of these stereotypes may lead to categorizations of others' political affiliations at rates significantly more accurate than chance guessing.

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