Predicting Election Outcomes from Positive and Negative Trait Assessments of Candidate Imagespops_745

Conventional wisdom, and a growing body of behavioral research, suggests that the nonverbal image of a candidate influences voter decision making. We presented subjects with images of political candidates and asked them to make four trait judgments based solely on viewing the photographs. Subjects were asked which of the two faces exhibited more competence, attractiveness, deceitfulness, and threat, which are arguably four of the most salient attributes that can be conveyed by faces. When we compared our subjects’ choices to the actual election outcomes, we found that the candidates chosen as more likely to physically threaten the subjects actually lost 65% of the real elections. As expected, our findings support the conclusions of Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, and Hall (2005) by showing a positive correlation between the competence judgments and the real election Political Psychology, Vol. 31, No. 1, 2010 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2009.00745.x