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."

Comments

Geez, pick the black guy.

[tjstork]

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.

Re:Geez, pick the black guy.

[DragonWriter]

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.

Of course, if you RTFA, the photos of other students were all Caucasian.
So if you always said a "black guy" was a Democrat, it wouldn't have any effect on the results at all.

Re:Geez, pick the black guy.

[phantomfive]

You didn't read the study. If you did, you would have seen that they actually tried to figure out what people were using to differentiate.

Apparently it's this: people with more powerful looking faces are more likely to be Republican (and are more likely to be chosen as Republican, regardless of their true affiliation), and people with warmer more friendly faces are picked to be Democratic

You should read the paper. They actually linked to the full study this time, so it's a worthy read; if you've never actually read a scientific study before, you'll realize how different real science is compared to how the press is when it reports on science.

Two things Liberals HATE!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two things Liberals hate!!!!!
1) Red-necks, and
2) Stereotyping

Re:when I work the polls I like to try and guess

[0racle]

"Large breasted college age chick. Democrat."

Political affiliation is totally what I'd be thinking about here too.

FACES OF YOUR CANDIDATES

[Philip K Dickhead]

More CHOICE than ever before!

http://tinyurl.com/democratface

http://tinyurl.com/republicanface

Re:Factors Are Likeability, Trustworthiness and Ag

[hey!]

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.

Re:Way better than chance?

[GradiusCVK]

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%).

Re:Better than chance?

[hey!]

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.

Re:when I work the polls I like to try and guess

[hey!]

But don't join the Democratic party thinking you're going to score. Those Dem babes only date Republican jerks.

It's a Democrat thing, and if you aren't in the party you wouldn't understand. We just can't resist a guy who will cynically screw with us then break our hearts.

Re:You can tell by their car

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Usually easy to tell the in the field; but actually pretty hard from just your description.

There is the hippy version, which will be some sort of beat-up Volkswagen loaded with "Coexist" stickers and vegan knicknacks and faded campaign paraphernalia either for a local green party candidate or for Nader; back when he was cool. Also likely is the presence of an "evolve" fish, a sticker supporting some candidate for local school board, and the phrase "my karma ran over your dogma".

Then there is the crazy jesus freak version, which will be some sort of beat-up American car plastered with "choose life" and "abortion stops a beating heart" stickers, along with at least one jesus fish(just a basic outline, or an outline with a cross inside if it is a moderate crazy jesus freak, a jesus fish with "truth" inside devouring a legged darwin fish if it is a militant crazy jesus freak). If the driver is male, there will probably be a "Gun control means 3 rounds to center mass" or similar sticker along with proclamations of loyalty to Limbaugh and at least one republican candidate(or a Constitution Party candidate, if the car belongs to a truly 100% USDA Prime wacko). If female, the stickers are more likely emphasize maudlin expressions of hyperemotional christian piety rather than politics.

In rare cases, you may encounter the Heavy Metal clunker, whose political leanings can be quite hard to discern. A rusting, but resplendently airbrushed, van adorned with stickers from bands that take skulls, spikes, umlauts, and succubus bikini chicks with battleaxes extremely seriously. You'll need a pretty solid knowledge of Metal to figure out the politics of the driver. Depending on the bands listed, you could be looking at a more or less apathetic individual who just likes that sort of music, or anything from an anarchist to a white power fascist. A clunker with 80 bumper stickers is a very good indicator that the driver leans hard; but you actually need to read one or two to see which way.

Re:Obvious

[AuMatar]

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.

Guess my affiliation

[Bob-taro]

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!"

Re:Guess my affiliation

[corbettw]

You bemoan a waste of the public treasury, so you could be either Republican or Libertarian. But you called out to your imaginary friend, so that narrows it: you're Republican.

Re:Way better than chance?

[radtea]

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.

Fun with stereotypes

[toadlife]

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.