((PKG)) POLITICS OF FIRST IMPRESSIONS
((Banner: Politics and Perceptions))
((Reporter/Camera: Steve Baragona))
((Adapted by: Philip Alexiou))
((Map: Princeton, New Jersey))
((Alexander Todorov, Psychologist, Princeton University))
The experiment is actually super simple. In every trial, the participant sees two faces. One is the face of the winner and one of the runner up.
((Courtesy: Alexander Todorov))
So, it would be an image of a Democrat and an image of a Republican who are going to compete. And then, we always told our participants, rely on your gut instinct. This is about first impressions. There are no right or wrong answer and just pick up the face that appear to you more competent. That’s all they’re doing.
We knew that people form impressions from faces and we just decided to look at real life effects, something that will matter and most people will care and actually I didn’t expect that the effects would be so strong. So, we included a lot of different measures and when the data came back, we could pick up from a single judgement, appearance of competence aggregated across a relatively small number of people about 70 percent of the senate elections.
((Courtesy: Alexander Todorov))
And in the actual study, right wing voters were more receptive to the message of this politician when the message was paired with this more dominant looking face, and liberal voters were more persuaded when the same message was accompanied by this other image of a more feminine looking leader. In fact, you can do it very quickly and the very first study we had a condition where we would present the faces for one second, but one second actually is a very long time when it comes to visual perception because our brain is incredibly skilled in processing visual information. I was certainly surprised because these are really important races. There’s tons of money going into it and there are lots of other variables and yet, we were able to predict a large percentage of the elections. So, when I say we predict 70 percent, we can pick up 70 out of 100. So, for voters who know next to nothing, there were large effects of appearance, and for highly knowledgeable voters, there’s no effect of appearance whatsoever. Communication, which starts with face to face communication, is the grounding, one of the grounding blocks of communication in general.
((Courtesy: Alexander Todorov))
So, we have this sort of, I call it illusion, that the moment I look at a face image, even of a person I’ve never seen, I know something about them, because this is what happens when you recognize familiar people, but there’s nothing to unlock in this kind of act of perception except your own biases and prejudices.
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