Does a Canidate's appearance matter to voters? And what about gender?
Terri
Transformed Facial Similarity as a Political Cue: A Preliminary
Investigation Jeremy N. Bailenson, Philip Garland, Shanto Iyengar, and
Nick Yee Department of Communication, Stanford University In Press,
Political Psychology
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 2 Abstract Experimental subjects
evaluated a political candidate whose face was digitally altered to
absorb the subjects' facial structure. For half of the subjects, the
photograph of the candidate was morphed such that the image presented
was a blend composed of 60% of the unfamiliar Caucasian male and 40% of
the subject. For the other half the photograph was unaltered. Given
previous research on implicit familiarity (Zajonc, 1968, 1980), we
predicted that the morph would advantage the candidate. The results
demonstrated no main effect of the similarity manipulation. However,
there was a robust similarity by gender interaction. Male subjects
evaluated the morphed candidate more favorably than the unaltered
photograph, while female subjects rated him more negatively. We discuss
potential explanations for this interaction effect, and explore the
possible implications of facial similarity as a political cue in both
high- and low-information elections.
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 3 FACIAL SIMILARITY AS A POLITICAL
CUE: A PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION Does a candidate's appearance matter
to voters? Although visual imagery is an essential element of
media-based campaigns, with the exception of a few scattered studies on
candidates' attractiveness (e.g. Efran & Patterson, 1974; Redlawsk &
Lau, 2003; Rosenberg & McCafferty, 1987), political scientists have
tended to discount the significance of nonverbal cues. In fact,
political communication researchers take for granted that candidates'
visual attributes are secondary to message-based considerations
including their policy positions, character traits (such as competence
and integrity), performance credentials, and, most notably, partisan
affiliation. This explicitly cognitive or substantive calculus is
thought to be so dominant that even in campaigns where candidates'
non-verbal and physical attributes, most notably their race and gender,
do influence vote preference, researchers attribute the connection to
voters' tendency to infer particular policy positions from these
attributes. Gender, for instance, is taken as a liberal "signal"
because most voters believe that women are generally more liberal and
inclined to oppose "male" positions such as increased military
spending or harsh remedies for crime (McDermott, 1988; Iyengar et al.,
1997). Similarly, increased support for African-American candidates
among African-American voters is considered symptomatic of group
solidarity or policy agreement (Bobo & Gilliam, 1990). In effect, a
candidate's race or gender is thought to trigger gender or race-based
stereotypes, which include links about the candidate's preferences on
the issues. It is true that race and gender are both transparent visual
cues. Yet, as the work described above suggests, they do not represent
purely individual-level attributes. To be seen as a woman
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 4 or African-American directs
attention both to group and individual attributes. Group interests, of
course, are closely embedded in American party politics (i.e.
African-Americans and women are both more closely associated with the
Democratic Party) and in that sense may be considered quasi-substantive
rather than purely physical characteristics. Our focus in this paper is
directed at the effects of individual rather than group-level visual
cues on political judgment. In particular, we are interested in
voters' reactions to a candidate's face. It is well documented that
one of the most fundamental recognition abilities humans possess is an
innate ability to discriminate among faces (Goldstein & Chance, 1970;
Farah, 1996). Moreover, facial cues convey more than a person's
gender, race or age; they also evoke strong affective responses (Zajonc
& Markus, 1984). In the context of political campaigns, therefore, we
would expect that a candidate's face could, by itself, influence
voters' impressions of the candidate, especially in situations in
which there is not a wealth of substantive information. Unlike previous
research, which has focused on the role of attractiveness (e.g., Riggle
1992), we consider the dimension of similarity. That is, do voters
reward candidates whose faces resemble their own?Research in social
psychology has demonstrated large-scale effects of similarity on social
influence. An individual judged more similar to a given person
(compared to a less similar individual) is considered more attractive
(Shanteau & Nagy, 1979; Berscheid & Walster, 1979), persuasive (Brock,
1965; Byrne, 1971), and is more likely to elicit altruistic helping
behavior in a dire situation (Gaertner & Dovidio, 1977). Moreover, the
evidence demonstrates that these effects are just as powerful when the
identity cue is implicit or recognizable only on an unconscious level
(Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). In other words, the tendency to
evaluate a similar other more favorably seems instinctive to humans.
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 5 There is no reason to suspect
that the affective payoff from similarity judgments would not apply to
candidates running for public office. Previous research has shown that
voters easily infer objective political traits from photographs (Bull,
Jenkins, & Stevens, 1983) and, more relevant to the current study, that
candidates with attractive faces receive more votes than candidates
with unattractive faces (Efran & Patterson, 1974). Of course, these
judgments about candidates can be made on both substantive and physical
dimensions. The fact that most voters prefer candidates who share their
party affiliation is a clear case of similarity-based voting. What is
novel about our analysis is that we separate the effects of partisan,
gender-based and facial similarity; in fact, we were especially
interested in the relative contributions of each to the overall
similarity effect. Given the widespread availability of digital
photographic representations of candidates in various forms of media
(e.g., digital video feeds on television, static digital images sent
via the Internet, or digital scans used for mass printing of direct
mail and flyers), it is only a matter oftime before political
candidates begin to take advantage of a strategy known as Transformed
Social Interaction (TSI; Bailenson & Beall, 2004; Bailenson, Beall,
Blascovich, Loomis & Turk, 2004). TSI makes it possible for a candidate
to modify his or her appearance in order to achieve optimal levels of
social influence. For example, imagine a scenario in which a candidate
broadcasts a political advertisement or press conference to two
different districts, one in which the distribution of voters is more
heavily African-American, and one in which the distribution of voters
is more heavily Latino. By applying TSI filters to the video feeds of
his image in real-time, the candidate could appear more
African-American in one district and more Latino in the other. In other
words, the ease of transforming digital images coupled with the
findings from similarity research discussed above creates a strong
incentive for campaign consultants to make their
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 6 candidate appear implicitly more
similar to important blocs of voters. In the current work, we report
the results from an experimental study demonstrating that the political
payoffs of implicit visual similarity are indeed significant.
Experimental Methodology DesignWe use an unusual experimental design to
manipulate facial similarity. Using Magic-Morph, a software application
that allows digital blending of two images, we presented subjects with
either an unknown Caucasian, male face (described as "Tom Steele, a
Democratic candidate for state legislative assembly"), or the same
unknown face that had been morphed with their own face in the ratio of
60:40. Using two of our subjects, the experimental stimulus for the two
levels of similarity is presented below in Figure 1. Figure 1: The
original and morphed faces.
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 7 In all cases, the candidate was
described as a Democrat. We examined three independent variables:
subject gender, subject party affiliation (Democrat or Republican), and
similarity condition (morphed or not). Measures We focus on four
separate indicators of candidate evaluation. Most basic, we
assessedvoting intention by asking subjects if they would consider
voting for Steele: "If you were living in Tom Steele's legislative
district, do you think you might vote for him?" Approximately one
quarter of the sample indicated they would vote for Steele, ten percent
indicated they would not, and the rest were ambivalent. We collapsed
the three categories into a dichotomy: willing voters versus the
undecided and unwilling. Second, we used the standard feeling
thermometer question. Subjects were asked to rate Steele between 0
("extremely cold") to 100 ("extremely warm"). Steele's mean
rating was 62. Third, we constructed an index of trait ratings based on
subjects' responses to three trait-related items. Subjects indicated
how well the terms "intelligent," "sincere" and "hard
working" described Steele. We summed across the three items and
rescored the index to range between zero and three.1Finally, we asked
subjects to rate the candidate's attractiveness on a four-point scale
ranging from "not at all attractive" to "very attractive."
ProcedureAfter reviewing the informed consent information, subjects
were told they would be participating in two separate studies -- one on
attitudes towards political candidates and another on attitudes towards
several social policies (a filler task). Subjects then had their
photographs taken with a digital camera. They were told the photograph
would be used for demographic purposes. Subjects were then given an
unrelated questionnaire as filler task while research 1The three items
were moderately correlated and Coefficient Alpha was .70.
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 8 assistants digitally blended the
photographs in a separate room. The digital blending process and
completion of the filler task both took about 5-10 minutes. When the
digital blending was complete, subjects were brought to a different
room and were greeted by a different set of experimenters. They were
seated in front of computer terminals and asked to complete a web-based
questionnaire. In the questionnaire, subjects first provided
biographical information such as party affiliation and how interested
they were in politics. Then they were shown the face of a candidate
named Tom Steele (either an original digital photograph or a blend of
the original and the subject's photograph) for 20 seconds, and were
asked to evaluate him on the measures described above. SubjectsSubjects
were 76 undergraduate students who received course credit for their
participation. The number of subjects in each of the eight pairwise
conditions (resulting fromcrossing the similarity manipulation, the
subject gender variable, and the subject party affiliation variable) is
shown in Appendix A. Results and Discussion Four subjects were removed
from our sample because in a post-experiment questionnaire they
explicitly indicated that they detected their own image in face of Tom
Steele. For the remaining 72 subjects, the cell means of the four
dependent measures across the full design (dependent measure x
similarity x gender x party affiliation) appear in Appendix A. We
relied onmultivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to test the
"in-group" hypothesis with party, gender, and visual similarity as
independent variables, interest in politics as a linear covariate, and
voting intention, feeling thermometer, trait score ratings, and
attractiveness as dependent variables.
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 9 MANOVA is commonly used for
assessing group differences across multiple dependent variables
simultaneously and is preferable to a series of univariate ANOVAS for
several reasons. First, MANOVA reduces the likelihood of Type 1 errors.
When conducting repeated univariate ANOVAs, the odds of reporting an
anomalous effect as significant (i.e., a Type I error) increases in
proportion to the number of tests run. A single MANOVA automatically
adjusts p-values to accommodate multiple independent tests, thus
lowering the likelihood of potential accumulation of error across tests
(i.e., experiment-wide error). Second, MANOVA provides simultaneous
estimation of the effects of any particular predictor on multiple
dependent measures (for details see Hair, Anderson, Tatham, & Black,
1998). MANOVA generates two classes of effects corresponding to each
predictor's multivariate and univariate effects on the dependent
variables. A significant multivariate effect indicates thatthe
predictor by itself (main effect) or in tandem with some other
predictor (interaction effect) affects all the dependent variables. The
multivariate effect in question is then decomposed into the univariate
components, i.e. the effect of a predictor on particular dependent
variables. In and of itself, visual similarity provided zero advantage
to Candidate Steele. The multivariate main effect for similarity was
non-significant (F 4, 59= .18, n.s.). Steele's feeling thermometer,
traits and attractiveness ratings as well as the proportion of subjects
who indicated a willingness to vote for him were all unchanged across
the similar and dissimilar conditions. Gender was also a trivial basis
for identifying with Steele (F 4, 59= 1.06, n.s.); women and men
evaluated him no differently. Despite the lack of any substantive
information about the candidate, his gender alone did not serve to
attract the support of men. The multivariate main effect for party was
borderline significant (F 4, 59= 2.11, p < .09); as expected, Democrats
evaluated Steele more favorably than Republicans and Independents.
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 10 Given the absence of any main
effects of similarity, we next pursued the joint effects of similarity
and the alternative indicators of group identity -- party affiliation
and gender. Weanticipated that the similarity manipulation would be
amplified among men and Democrats, but especially among the former. Our
reasoning was as follows. Gender and facial similarity are both
non-verbal affective cues.2Therefore, we expected that the match
between the two non-verbal cues (a candidate of the same gender who
also looks like the subject) would be especially compelling. Partisan
identity, on the other hand, represents more of a verbal-level (e.g.,
policy agreement, ideological affinity) cognitive bond, thus weakening
the relevance of the fellow partisan-similar face combination (a
Democrat who looks like the subject). In short, we anticipated that
gender would be the more powerful moderator of the similarity effect
than partisanship. In effect, we expected that the effect was driven by
affective rather than cognitive processing. There was no significant
multivariate interaction between party and similarity (F 4,59 = .67, n.
s.). Democrats who encountered a more similar-looking Democratic
candidate did not rate him any more enthusiastically. As expected, the
multivariate interaction between gender and similarity proved robust
(F4,59 =3.08, p < .02, Eta-Squared = .17). As shown in Figure 2, three
of the four separate univariate gender by similarity interactions were
significant corresponding to the feeling thermometer (p < .01),
attractiveness (p < .02) and vote intention (p < .07). 2An equally
relevant non-verbal indicator of group affiliation is race/ethnicity.
We exclude it both because it is a less stark (e.g. more than two
categories) marker and, more importantly, because there werevery few
African-Americans in the sample. When we collapsed Hispanics, Asians
and African-Americans into a single non-white category, there were no
significant multivariate interaction effects, though the means were in
the same direction as the gender data.
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 11 Figure 2: The three significant
interactions between gender and similarity: Feeling Thermometer
(F1,62=8.08, p < .006, Eta-Squared = .12), Attractiveness (F1,62=5.02,
p < .02, Eta-Squared = .08), and Voting Intention (F1,62=3.33, p < .07,
Eta-Squared = .05). The similar version of Candidate Steele gained
support among male voters but lost support with female voters. In all
three cases the magnitude of the mean differences associated with
similarity for men and women were striking. Vote intention, for
instance, increased by twenty points among men shown the similar face
and decreased by that same margin among women.
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 12 The average thermometer rating
of Steele among men increased twelve points in the similar condition,
but fell by ten points among women. The male slopes in Figure 1 are
intuitive: when the candidate is seen as an in-group member, the
implicit non-verbal cue triggers positive affect. Male voters were much
more inclined to vote for the candidate who looked like them. Equally
striking, but counter-intuitive, women voters were less inclined to
vote for the more similar candidate. In fact, on all three measures,
women were repelled by evidence of similarity in a male candidate's
face. In short, that male participants would vote for the candidate
that captured a greater share of their facial structure conformed
exactly to our predictions. On the other hand, we did not predict the
"boomerang effect" with female participants. Our account of this
counterintuitive finding is, accordingly, speculative. We discuss three
potential explanations: 1) morph quality, 2) outgroup priming, and 3)
processing incongruence. First, women may have found Candidate Steele
less appealing when they were morphed into Steele because the process
of blending a female and male face produces visual artifacts in the
resulting image that may prove unsettling and are certainly unexpected.
The structures of male and female faces are notably different (Farkas,
1981), and it simply may be more difficult to achieve a realistic morph
between genders than within genders. Moreover, the resultant
'feminine male' may have been particularly problematic in the
political candidate context. This hypothesis receives some support from
the interaction between similarity and gender on the attractiveness
ratings. As Figure 1 demonstrates, women rated the morph of themselves
into Steele as lessattractive than the original version of Steele.
However, the appropriate test of this hypothesis would require a
separate group of participants to rate the attractiveness of faces
morphed both within and across gender. In the current study, we cannot
make that comparison.
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 13 A second explanation for the
boomerang effect is the possibility that the crossing of genders
resulted in unconscious priming (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996) of the
differences between female participants and Steele. In other words,
when viewing the distinctive cross-gender morph, female participants
implicitly recognized the presence of a female in the image. As a
result, they were primed, (i.e., subtly reminded) to think about gender
differences, and this priming served to reinforce the knowledge that
the candidate belonged to the out-group (i.e., Steele was a male).
Because their gender identity was reinforced, Steele was punished for
incorporating female features into his face. A third explanation for
the boomerang effect relies on self-categorization theory (Turner,
Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987), which provides a framework in
which people constantly reinforce their own identity by comparing
themselves to members of in-groups and contrasting themselves to
members of out-groups. In work by Smith and Henry (1996), participants
made timed self-descriptiveness judgments for a variety of traits. When
a given trait described the participant, but in general did not
describe most members of that participant's in-group, the participant
was extremely slow to verify the trait and often made errors. In other
words, people find it relatively difficult to process self-relevant
traits that are normally attributed to the out-group. In the current
study, women subconsciously saw their own face morphed into a man.
Consequently, they witnessed a merging of self attributes (i.e., their
own face) with attributes that are normally attributed to the out-group
(male features from the original photograph of candidate Steele). This
merging of self and out-group traits may have exaggerated the perceived
difference between the subject and the candidate, thus triggering the
backlash or boomerang effect. This is in line with previous work that
demonstrates that people automatically
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 14 and subconsciously react
negatively to the nonverbal behaviors of unfamiliar foreign political
leaders (Warnecke, Masters, & Kempter, 1992). All three of these
explanations rely on some type of implicit processing of the human
face. Research has demonstrated that drawing inferences about the human
face is automatic and uncontrolled (Ito, Thompson, & Cacioppo, 2004),
and that people draw inferences from the human face without necessarily
being aware of drawing those inferences (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996).
Furthermore, previous work that blends subjects' faces into the faces
of experimental stimuli finds the exact same boomerang gender effect
(DeBruine, 2002), although that data does not provide any evidence to
support one of our three explanations more than the other two. In sum,
the current data demonstrate that one of the automatic inferences drawn
during face processing is some type of similarity or self presence.
Summary and Implications The implications of the current findings are
quite clear. In most state and local elections, voters possess very
little information about the candidates on the ballot. In such
"low-information" races, where voters lack substantive information,
visual affective cues may provide the dominant basis for electoral
choice (for a general discussion of affect and choice, see Zajonc,
1968, 1980). Our results show that in a low-information context, a
candidate can increase electoral support by as much as 20 percentage
points simply by incorporating elements of individual voters' faces
into his or her campaign photograph. Of course, if the candidate
attempts to incorporate visual features of an outgroup into his or her
image (i.e., voters of the opposite gender), then the potential for a
backlash is quite large. Visual similarity strengthens the bond between
candidates and voters who have some physical basis to identify with the
candidate.
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 15 Interestingly, facial
similarity did not work to strengthen the partisan divide; Democrats
were not significantly more apt to vote for Steele when he appeared
more similar to them. Of course, our present study cannot be
generalized to higher-level campaigns where voters have greater
familiarity with the candidates and the issues. For those who subscribe
to the standard "cognitive" model of vote choice, the prediction is
that facial similarity would have little to no impact on vote choice.
On the other hand, scholars who favor a more affect-driven view of vote
choice might predict quite the opposite -- that in races where the
issues and candidates are more salient, affective cues might have an
even stronger impact on vote choice (see, for instance, Markus, 2001;
Markus and MacKuen, 2001). A just-completed study of similarity effects
in the 2004 presidential campaign lends support to the latter group; we
found significant effects of similarity on evaluations of both
presidential candidates (see Bailenson, Iyengar, and Yee, 2005). Of
course there are a number of limitations to the current study. First,
we only utilized a Caucasian, male, Democratic candidate. In future
work we plan on utilizing candidates of different parties, genders, and
ethnicities. In particular we need to systematically examine the gender
effect in greater detail by having a number of candidates of each
gender. Moreover, we only utilized a single level of morphing. We chose
forty percent because pretests indicated that this was the highest
level a person's photograph could be morphed into a photograph
without himor her explicitly noticing. Finally, the results would be
stronger had we included a control condition in which subjects
evaluated a candidate morphed with a second unfamiliar photograph.In
other words, there could be some effect of the morphing process in
general, as opposed to morphing with the self. Nonetheless, this
initial study demonstrates extremely powerful results. In future work
we plan on remedying these shortcomings.
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 16 Given these results, as well as
findings from the previously-cited psychological research suggesting
the powerful effects of similarity on interpersonal attraction, it is
not implausible to suggest that image manipulation may become a popular
(albeit arguably immoral) strategy for campaign strategists. Currently,
mass mailings on behalf of candidates are tailored to age groups and to
geographical districts; in fact, the decisive advantage of mail over
television as a platformfor campaign advertising is the ability to
target specific groups of voters (Iyengar et al., 2001). As the price
of technology falls and the use of digital photography accelerates (by
one recent estimate, residents of Boston have their pictures taken many
times daily without their knowledge; Savo, 2004), it is likely that
photographic databases of voters will accumulate in the same manner as
email and demographic databases. A further reason to expect increased
use of morphed faces in campaign advertising is that the technology for
morphing faces can be automated, requiring no human artistry or
manipulation. Given an input of photographs of an individual, current
software packages can automatically detect and manipulate designated
facial features (Feris, Krueger & Cesar, 2004). Software that
automatically morphs a candidate's image based on stock images that
are archived with a voter's address is a possibility that could
arrive in months rather than years. To conclude, in elections where
voters possess little if any sufficient substantive information, they
might have no choice but to rely on visual cues. This study shows that
for voters who have attributes in common with the candidate, facial
similarity is an important cue. In politics, the maxim "birds of a
feather flock together" seems apt.
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 21 Author Notes The authors would
like to thank John Walker for programming assistance, RosannaGuadgano
for software assistance and for comments on an earlier draft of this
paper, and Maureen Marquess for administering the experiment.
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Facial Similarity as a Political Cue 22 Appendix A Pairwise Means of
Gender, Party Affiliation and Similarity Manipulation On Vote
Intention, Feeling Thermometer, Trait Index, and Attractiveness Rating
Male Democrat Republican / Independent Measures Similar (n = 9) Not
Similar (n = 6) Similar (n = 5) Not Similar (n = 9) Vote Intention 0.44
0.00 0.20 0.22 Thermometer 69.33 58.33 63.60 55.56 Trait Index 2.11
1.83 1.20 1.56 Attractiveness 2.11 1.83 2.80 2.56 Female Democrat
Republican / Independent Measures Similar (n = 13) Not Similar (n = 14)
Similar (n = 9) Not Similar (n = 7) Vote Intention 0.31 0.36 0.00 0.26
Thermometer 58.54 65.71 57.11 60.00 Trait Index 1.08 1.07 1.00 1.57
Attractiveness 2.00 2.36 2.00 2.71
T.McClure
"handome" political candidates were apt to be more liked by the voters.
Terri
late 80's /early 90's I like Senator Paul Simon...but I remember that
he had a "funny look" about him: large ears, big coke-bottle glasses,
and he wore ties...He had a nice voice and was well spoken. He also
appeared sincere and genuine.
I think that ever since television entered the scene, politicians need
to be "telegetic" in appearance.
I think Kerry ran into the same trouble: while he did sort of look
"presidential" he is somewhat unattractive.
So there is something about having an appealing look --- or at least
"symetrical" features or at least some sort of "balanced" look...
...but doesn't President Bush have one eye higher than the other?
Terri
John
enlightened on the politics and behaviors of American society today.
He/She really covers some points that all may have a role in elections.