Democrat or Republican? Using Political Stereotypes as a Bias Discussion Exercise

Republicans Prefer Republican-Looking Leaders: Political Facial Stereotypes Predict Candidate Electoral Success Among Right-Leaning Voters

Previous research suggests that voting in elections is influenced by appearance-based personality inferences (e.g., whether a political candidate has a competent-looking face). However, since voters cannot objectively evaluate politicians’ personality traits, it remains to be seen whether appearance-based inferences about a characteristic continue to influence voting when clear information abou...

Obama cares about visuo-spatial attention: perception of political figures moves attention and determines gaze direction.

Processing an abstract concept such as political ideology by itself is difficult but becomes easier when a background situation contextualizes it. Political ideology within American politics, for example, is commonly processed using space metaphorically, i.e., the political "left" and "right" (referring to Democrat and Republican views, respectively), presumably to provide a common metric to wh...

Democrats and Republicans Can Be Differentiated from Their Faces

BACKGROUND Individuals' faces communicate a great deal of information about them. Although some of this information tends to be perceptually obvious (such as race and sex), much of it is perceptually ambiguous, without clear or obvious visual cues. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Here we found that individuals' political affiliations could be accurately discerned from their faces. In Study 1, ...

As-If-Republican Interpretation

The Opposite of Republican: Polarization and Political Categorization

Two experiments examined the typicality structure of contrasting political categories. In Experiment 1, two separate groups of participants rated the typicality of 15 individuals, including political figures and media personalities, with respect to the categories Democrat or Republican. The relation between the two sets of ratings was negative, linear, and extremely strong, r = -.9957. Essentia...