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

Don't blame me

[Smartcowboy]

I voted for Kodos.

Re:Obama Is White

[Doc Ruby]

No, the story we're discussing points out that a strong basis for association with a candidate is their "looks" in common. This "Mulatto" idea you have is a fake category that is a contiuum. There are really only two distinct races out of the "Black", "White" and "Mulatto" categories, which are the very few "Black" Americans with only subsaharan African ancestors, and the somewhat larger "White" category of Americans with only European ancestors. By far the largest group is what you're calling "Mulatto", which also includes the vast majority of supposedly "Black" Americans, and also the very major majority of supposedly "White" Americans. The two distinct groups are so small, and so different from the categories people are put into, that those categories are not categories at all, but gross inaccuracies.

The species divide is real: humans and monkeys can't produce mixed offspring. That is so far from the case in practice among Americans that using that reduction extreme is absurd. Much more accurate than "we're all monkeys" (apes, really), though true in a very general sense, is the much more precisely true statement that "we're all Americans".