Psychology|People’s voting decisions are influenced by the candidate’s appearance.
The summary is made by artificial intelligence and checked by a human.
A politician’s appearance affects voting behavior.
Research from the University of Pennsylvania shows that monkeys recognize election winners from photographs.
Rhesus macaques looked longer at losers in Senate and gubernatorial elections, but not in presidential elections.
Masculine features, such as Jykevä leuka, are correlated with electoral success.
Also in Finland it has been established that a politician’s appearance affects how much people vote for him in elections. Good looks bring more votes.
New, still peerless research From the United States, it shows that the political preferences of the voter can be very primitive.
The monkeys, our distant relatives, recognize the election winner from a photo.
Pennsylvanian a university brain researcher Michael Platt and his colleagues showed the rhesus macaques pairs of pictures of several previous US gubernatorial, senate, and presidential election pairs.
The researchers measured how long the monkeys looked at pictures of faces. Usually the monkeys’ eyes were fixed on one of the candidates.
It turned out that in a sample of more than 270 senate and gubernatorial elections, the monkeys’ gaze usually lingered longer on the losers. They looked at the loser longer in 54.4 percent of the cases, which is more than chance would expect.
In the presidential election, no such difference was noticed between the candidates.
Simian according to the researchers, the gaze reacts to social dominance. Masculine faces, which are similar in macaques and humans, exude such authority: the chin is Jykevä in relation to the cheekbones.
The monkeys only glance at the dominant monkey face and then look away to avoid eye contact. Open eye contact is interpreted as hostile, and they do not want to challenge the dominant monkey with it.
The winners of the Senate and gubernatorial elections also had more cleft jaws. The monkeys avoided them.
The monkeys with the strongest jaw hated looking at them the most. They also got the most votes.
In the monkey study, the same thing that has been observed in humans was repeated. Adults and children under school age have predicted the election winners with the same accuracy based on just a facial image.
Researchers emphasize that many other things than facial image influence people’s voting decisions.
If people were to vote based on masculine traits alone, you would think that female candidates would have a poor chance of doing well. However, in the researchers’ data, women won about half of the votes.
Nevertheless, people also obey their more primitive tendencies.
“There is a little monkey inside of us when we vote and pretty much in all our actions,” Platt points out Science magazine in the interview.
How about who do the macaques predict will win the upcoming US presidential election? The eye test did not favor either candidate, Terrible Harris and not Donald Trump.
On the other hand, a difference was found in the vice-presidential candidates if the vote was made between them. Trump’s radar pair J.D. Vance would then lose to Harris’s vice presidential bid Tim Walzille.