The Attractiveness Halo: Why Some Candidates are Perceived More Favorably than Others

Olivola and Todorov (Elected in 100 milliseconds: appearance-based trait inferences and voting. J Nonverbal Behav, 2010) provide a convincing demonstration that competence ratings based on 1-second exposures to paired photos of US congressional candidates predict election outcomes at better than chance levels. However, they do not account for variation in competence judgments. In their analysis, Olivola and Todorov show that attractiveness, familiarity, babyfacedness and age are proximal predictors of vote choice, but find that after controlling for competence these factors no longer reliably influence the margin of electoral victory. Drawing on well-documented halo effects of attractiveness on character-based inferences and the extensive literature on mere exposure effects, we re-organize Olivola and Todorov’s analysis into a simple path model to explore the causal ordering of these factors. We find that spontaneous assessments of attractiveness and familiarity occur prior to attributions of competence, and thus exert a downstream effect on judgments of competence. Voting is a complex process determined by a range of factors, including partisanship (Campbell et al. 1960; Green et al. 2002), ideological proximity (Downs 1957), and judgments of economic performance (Fiorina 1981). Recent research by Todorov and colleagues has shown that in the absence of these traditional explanatory variables, snapjudgments of competence based on short exposures to paired photos of US congressional candidates predicted actual election outcomes at substantially better than chance levels (Todorov et al. 2005; Benjamin and Shapiro 2009). In their target article featured in this volume, Olivola and Todorov (2010) argue that it is competence judgments in particular that predict electoral preferences, and they find that competence is more strongly associated with actual election outcomes than are other facial cues such as attractiveness, familiarity, age, or babyfacedness. While we find no fault with their results, we consider whether judgments of competence function as rationalizations that occur earlier in the B. Verhulst (&) ! M. Lodge ! H. Lavine Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-4392, USA e-mail: [email protected] 123 J Nonverbal Behav (2010) 34:111–117 DOI 10.1007/s10919-009-0084-z