Voting and image

Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies reveal that voters are persuaded more by the negative aspects of a politician's looks than by the positive features. The findings apply specifically if the voter was previously unaware of the politician. Ahead of the US elections, voters there should read on but let their political conscience guide their voting decision.

Michael Spezio, an assistant professor of psychology at Scripps College and visiting associate at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working with colleagues there and at Princeton University, the University of Iowa, Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, Korea University, Seoul, turned to fMRI brain-imaging studies to help them unravel voting decisions.

The researchers point out that the decisions we make about who to trust, who to fear, and this coming week for Americans, at least, who to vote for in an election, depends, in part, on the snap judgements we make about people's faces. This idea is nothing new, first impressions are very important to social animals like ourselves. To our ancestors, a quick visual test of whether a new kid on the block was friend or foe could mean a matter of life or death, or at least the difference between getting a decent meal or being left with the scraps.

In modern society, such life-determining decisions are commonly played out on a higher plane. Your chances of survival are not usually based on day-to-day decisions about friend or foe, but are somewhat abstracted to the political level, especially during times of economic depression, war, or natural disaster. Although the general mechanism underpinning our initial judgements, may fly in the face of the advice that one should not judge a book by its cover, it is nevertheless scientifically well documented. What has not been well understood is the detailed mechanisms of how we make snap decisions on the basis of appearances.

To probe how a politician's appearance might influence voting decisions, Spezio, Rangel, and colleagues examined brain activation in subjects looking at the faces of real, but previously unknown, politicians. They used an fMRI scanner at the Caltech Brain Imaging Center to obtain high-resolution images of brain activation as volunteers made decisions about politicians based solely on their photograph.

The researchers conducted independent studies using different groups of volunteers viewing the images of different politicians. The researchers showed one group pairs of photos, each with a politician coupled with their opponent in a real election, from 2002, 2004, or 2006. One group of volunteers were asked to make character-trait judgments about the politicians - for example, asking themselves which of the two politicians in the pair looked more competent to hold congressional office, or which looked more likely to physically threaten the volunteer. In another experiment, volunteers were asked to cast their vote for one politician in the pair; once again, their decisions were based only on the politicians' appearances. Importantly, none of the study subjects were familiar with the politicians whose images they viewed.

The results correlated with actual election outcomes. For example, politicians who were thought to look the most physically threatening in the experiment were more likely to have actually lost their elections in real life. The correlation held true even when volunteers saw the politicians' pictures for less than one tenth of a second.

The researchers found that the photos of those politicians who lost elections, both in the lab and in the real world, were associated with greater activation in key brain areas known to be important for processing emotion. This was true when volunteers simply voted and also when they closely examined the politicians' pictures for character traits.

"The results from our two studies suggest that intangibles like a candidate's appearance may work preferentially, or more uniformly, via negative motives, and by means of brain processing contributing to such negative evaluations," explains Spezio. "It's important to note that the brain region most closely associated with seeing pictures of election losers, known as the insula, is known to be important in processing both negative and positive emotional evaluations. Its increased activation in response to the appearance of election losers is consistent with its association with negative emotional evaluations in several domains, including the sight of someone who looks disgusted or untrustworthy," he adds.

Team member Ralph Adolphs of Caltech warns that while the findings are provocative, the statistically significant effects are also very small. "There is no doubt that many, many sources of information come into play when we make important and complex decisions, such as will happen in the upcoming elections," he explains, "We are not claiming that how the candidates look is all there is to the story of how voters make up their minds - or that this is even the biggest part of the story. However, we do think it has some effect - and, moreover, that this effect may be largest when voters know little else about a candidate."

Reference:

M. L. Spezio, A. Rangel, R. M. Alvarez, J. P. O'Doherty, K. Mattes, A. Todorov, H. Kim, R. Adolphs (2008). A neural basis for the effect of candidate appearance on election outcomes Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsn040

The views represented in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.