Slashdot Mirror
Political Affiliation Can Be Differentiated By Appearance
quaith writes "It's not the way they dress, but the appearance of their face. A study published in PLoS One by Nicholas O. Rule and Nalini Ambady of Tufts University used closely cropped greyscale photos of people's faces, standardized for size. Undergrads were asked to categorize each person as either a Democrat or Republican. In the first study, students were able to differentiate Republican from Democrat senate candidates. In the second, students were able to differentiate the political affiliation of other college students. Accuracy in both studies was about 60% — not perfect, but way better than chance."
What a dumb study. Of course you can pick a party affiliation by appearance. First off, if you always say a black guy is a Democrat, you'd be right 90% of the time, based on voting records. That would give you 60% overall correct, even if everything else was 50,50, assuming a sample set that roughly mirrors the population.
This is my sig.
When I work the polls each year I try to pass the time by guessing the party affiliations of my voters.
"Hmm, large SUV and business suit. Republican."
"Large breasted college age chick. Democrat."
"Subaru Outback and peacenik bumper stickers. Green Party."
"Pick-up truck and AR-15. Libertarian."
It's amazing how bored you get working a 15 hour day when you only get 40 voters.... ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Lets play a game someone's driving a clunker and they have 80 bumper stickers on it, which way to they lean?
There are two things Liberals hate!!!!!
1) Red-necks, and
2) Stereotyping
More CHOICE than ever before!
http://tinyurl.com/democratface
http://tinyurl.com/republicanface
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
The Churchill quote only demonstrates how clever rhetoric does not an argument make.
I am often amazed at how powerful a beautiful but specious assertion can be. Sometimes it is a compelling analogy that has no actual bearing on the topic at hand. Other times (as in this Churchill case) it is a clever dichotomy that begs the question. This particular quote is a wonderful example of begging the question. It is no more possible to support conservatism with it than it is possible to literally pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
That was an analogy, wasn't it? I hope you didn't find it too beguiling.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
And I have invented a method for telling if someone is a criminal by taking various measurements of their head! I think I will call this "phrenology".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Statistical significance can't be pinned down to a number like .8% in the general case - statistical significance is hugely dependent upon the sample size. However, the parent poster is correct in that the article was referring to statistical significance, not necessarily to a huge correlation. Generally speaking, a study like this makes an assumption that there is no connection between appearance and political affiliation (i.e. the average accuracy of these guesses should be something like 50% - could be higher or lower depending on how the study was executed - if there were 3 possible parties to choose from instead of two for example, or if it was well known that 90% of the participants all belonged to a given party). They then execute an experiment which provides evidence for or against that hypothesis. Whatever they were expecting (let's say it was 50% correct answers if it was totally random), they found 60% correct answers - and because of the number of people participating in the study, they determined that the chances that they would find 60% correct answers if the guesses really were random (i.e. there was no hint from appearance) would have been astronomically small. In this way, 60% correct can give incredibly convincing evidence that appearance is linked to political affiliation, even if that link is relatively subdued (after all, 60% is not that much more than 50%).
Sure, the Republican candidate is usually the one with a blue suit jacket with American Flag pin, white shirt and tie. Often they have the jacket slung over their shoulder and their sleeves rolled up.
The Democratic candidate, of course, is the one with a blue suit jacket with American Flag pin, white shirt and tie. Look for them carrying their jacket slung over their shoulder with their sleeves rolled up.
Then there's hair. Republicans either have naturally good hair, or they overcompensate so much that their hair looks like a mutated doughboy helmet. They never have beards. The Democrats on the other hand either have obviously elaborate and expensive haircuts, although many of them just have naturally good hair. Key point: they're always clean shaven.
Now as to actual policies -- don't get me started on that.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Oh the sweet irony of that quote with the current popularity of Fox "News" :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The old saw: "If you're not a liberal when you're young, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative when you're older, you have no brain." (Variants have been attributed to Winston Churchill, though there is no indication that he ever said this)
Age may not be such a bad indicator after all.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Please note that Churchill was English. Liberal and conservative are totally different over there. Liberal means anti-government intervention, conservative means the opposite. For example Margaret Thatcher called Ronald Reagan "the greatest liberal of our time". So yeah, that makes sense- if you're naive you think that markets and good faith will make everything work out ok. When you get older and wise enough to know better, you want society to step in and fix shit.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I'm not going to state my party affiliation. I'll just say that when I saw that this pointless study was funded by OUR TAX DOLLARS via an NSF grant, I thought, "God help us!"
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
60% versus 50%? How is that WAY better?
With a large enough sample size a result like this can be highly statistically significant, but still useless as a predictor.
For example, if I have 2000 marbles, half white and half black, and pull them out randomly and ask you to predict what colour each one is, if you guessed correctly 60% of the time (you got 600 white marbles correct and 600 black marbles correct) you'd be bumping up against three sigma (over 99%) odds of your results NOT being due to chance, but some incredible marble-colour-guessing gene that evolution or possibly archeobacteria had slipped you. Up the number to 20,000 marbles with 60% accuracy and you'd be a proven phenomenon, even though you utility as a marble-colour picker would be pretty much useless unless it also happened to work on a roulette wheel.
This is something that it can be hard for people outside the machine learning community to understand: an enormously significant result, statistically, can still make for a practically useless classifier.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Agreed. Liberals pretend they care about the poor while walking past beggars on the street without even making eye contact and consider themselves compassionate when they later complain that someone in a higher tax bracket should take care of him
That's a really insightful observation. A friend of mine is a die hard big city politically correct liberal. Amazingly enough she can't stand to make eye contact with the homeless and is afraid to venture out of her predominately white neighborhood if it means she has to cross into the dark part of town.
The last one was actually the subject of an amusing exchange between of the two of us. Earlier in the day I had noticed an African-American individual walking across the middle of a busy street against the light and nowhere near a crosswalk. I made a comment along the lines of "There goes a negative stereotype" and she jumped on me for being a "racist". Later in the evening when we were driving home I got cut off by someone and honked at them. No big deal, just my natural reaction when confronted with stupidity on the roadway. Of course she flips out and starts worrying that we are going to get shot because (and I quote) "We are white in the wrong part of town!"
So I asked her, who is the racist? The person who makes an off color joke or the person who is afraid to venture into the parts of town that don't conform with their own skin color? Needless to say, she didn't much care for that observation......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I don't know where you read it either, but if I were you I'd find it and throw it away. I know many people who were very conservative when they were younger, but got progressively more liberal during the Bush era. People tend to change based up their experiences, and wisdom tends to come with age. The way you are telling it conservatives are wise and liberals are foolish. We recently had 8 years of solid proof that this simply isn't a valid conclusion. (which is not to say it is the other way around either; I hereby declare no political affiliation or preference for the purpose of this post)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
My Dad is a classic big city East Coast liberal. In the 1960's he participated in civil rights marches, and in the 1980's I heard him constantly bitching about Reagan's economic policies. For the last forty years, he has given tons to homeless people on the street, with one caveat. Instead of throwing them a buck or two, he offers to buy them whatever they want at a nearby fast food joint. Many don't accept (for obvious reasons), but they do, he goes in with them, buys them whatever they want and eats with them.
He's also been self-employed for his entire life.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
There's two types of conservative, fiscal and social. Fiscal conservatives want to control the budget through less spending or more tax. Social conservatives want to control your body and bedroom.
Fiscal liberals say things like "deficits don't matter" (Rummy), social liberals say things like "I have a dream".
Out of the possible combinations my personal preference is fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Yeah, that usually means more taxes but nobody ever claimed civilization was cheap.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I suspected this kind of thing when I started noticing those election-day photos of the rally headquarters for the various candidates. "All of the chicks in the Republican audience are always smokin' hot babes", I'd think to myself.
And then it dawned on me. If there is a correlation between appearance and political leanings, how would any causal relationship work? I think the causation of politics determining appearance is the easier one to spot. Most conservatives I know seem to place more of an emphasis on appearance, while the liberals I know place more of an emphasis on ideas; feeling that ideas will stand or fall on their own merit, regardless of the appearance of the messenger. So, liberals don't see as much need for dressing up before trying to pitch their ideas.
Now, the causation from appearance to politics is a little more subtle. My suspicion is that the people who are "less beautiful" are the ones who spend more of their time on the outside of popularity. They're they people who never made the ballot for prom queen, didn't get asked to the school dance, didn't have as many romantic opportunities. They got more of a taste of what it's like to be a "have not" or to be outside of the majority. This experience, I believe, can cause them to have the increased empathy and tendency to "look out for others" that seems to characterize liberal thought.
On the other hand, the people are very attractive or physically gifted had an easier time of things. Athletic success came easier to the "natural born athletes", and the pretty or charismatic people had an easier time getting others to back their ideas or plans. Things just went a little easier for them. Because we can only experience the world through our own eyes, I can see how the "beautiful people" could believe that (as it was for them) one only needs to apply themselves to a goal and it'll work out. This could give rise to the "anybody willing to work hard will find success" mindset that we tend to see in conservatives.