Voters Swayed By Candidates Who Share Their Looks

iandoh writes "Stanford researchers have found that voters are subconsciously swayed by candidates who share their facial features. In three experiments, researchers at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab worked with cheap, easy-to-use computer software to morph pictures of about 600 test subjects with photos of politicians. And they kept coming up with the same results: For the would-be voters who weren't very familiar with the candidates or in perfect lockstep with their positions or political parties, the facial similarity was enough to clinch their votes."

Comments

Re:Mark this article

[The tECHIDNA]

That may be happening because the headline's misleading (as usual); it should be

Undecided Voters Swayed by Candidates Who Share Their Looks

But then, /. wouldn't get as many "Um, wha??" clicks, and the more cynical of us would tag the story "noshitsherlock" ;-)
Hey -- There's your idea for a social experiment!

Re:Mark this article

[Terminal Saint]

"correlation is not causation" is one of the most overused mantras of slashdot users who want to be more skeptical than thou. Yes it's true that correlation does not always equal causation, but causation does tend to result in correlation.

It's been shown that people are more attracted to people with similar facial features when choosing mates, it makes some sense that people would feel better about choosing a leader with similar facial features for the same biological reasons.

Now I'm not saying that this hypothesis is clearly true, just that we don't have to jump all over it.