The divergent fallacies of liberals and conservatives

[ICantSpellDawg]

That's a very interesting spin on the study.

Meanwhile: It's all in the face, bro.

Todorov showed pairs of portraits to roughly a thousand people, and asked them to rate the competence of each person. Unbeknownst to the test subjects, they were looking at candidates for the House and Senate in 2000, 2002, and 2004. In study after study, participants’ responses to the question of whether someone looked competent predicted actual election outcomes at a rate much higher than chance—from sixty-six to seventy-three per cent of the time. Even looking at the faces for as little as one second, Todorov found, yielded the exact same result: a snap judgment that generally identified the winners and losers. Todorov concluded that when we make what we think of as well-reasoned voting decisions, we are actually driven in part by our initial, instinctive reactions to candidates. [...]

In a 2009 study published in Science, the psychologists John Antonakis and Olaf Dalgas suggested that, when we judge a candidate as more or less competent, we do it in the same way that children do. They first asked a group of adults to rate pairs of faces, taken from the 2002 French parliamentary elections, based on how capable they seemed. When they compared the ratings to actual election results, the correspondence was seventy-two per cent. The ratings even predicted the margin of victory; the more competently-rated the face, the higher the margin. The researchers then had a group of children play a computer game, simulating a boat trip from Troy to Ithaca, in which they had to choose a captain for the voyage; their options consisted of the same 2002 election candidates. The two sets of responses were indistinguishable from each other: seventy-one per cent of the time, the children picked the election winner to pilot the boat.

This study is interesting. I don't believe that people often make ideologically rational decisions, but rather rely on instinct and "gut" reactions, which are unhelpful in a political arena.