Should Candidates Smile to Win Elections? An Application of Automated Face Recognition Technology

Horiuchi, Yusaku; Komatsu, Toshinori; Nakaya, Fumio

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9221.2012.00917.x

Cited by 40 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Because Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 06:00 10 October 2015 politicians have greater control in Twitter than in the mass media over which pictures are presented to voters, they can post more favorable images (such as using friendly, smiling pictures as their icons), which will increase their likability (Horiuchi, Komatsu, & Nakaya, 2012). This leads us to the following hypothesis.…”

Section: Personality Traitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tweets That Matter: Evidence From a Randomized Field Experiment in Japan

Kobayashi¹,

Ichifuji

2015

Political Communication

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Although election campaigns are increasingly utilizing social media, only a few studies have investigated their effects experimentally. To fill this gap in the literature, we conducted a field experiment to examine the effects of a campaign that used Twitter during the 2013 House of Councillors election in Japan. The treatment was exposure to tweets from Tōru Hashimoto, the mayor of Osaka and co-leader of the Japan Restoration Party, who has the largest number of Twitter followers among Japanese politicians. Participants assigned to the treatment group followed Hashimoto and the two placebos, whereas those assigned to the control condition followed only the two placebos. They followed the politicians continuously for approximately one month. Pre-and posttreatment measures were collected using online surveys, and treatment compliance was continuously checked via Twitter application programming interface (API). Following Hashimoto on Twitter during the election campaign had a positive impact on feelings toward Hashimoto. This effect was not mediated by issue knowledge or the evaluation of Hashimoto's personal traits, and no effects were observed on voting. These findings suggest that repeated exposure to a politician's messages on Twitter may only result in a mere exposure effect, which nevertheless generates favorable overall attitudes about the politician.

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Section: Personality Traitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tweets That Matter: Evidence From a Randomized Field Experiment in Japan

Kobayashi¹,

Ichifuji

2015

Political Communication

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“…While this may be true, because most of these studies focus on American samples, it remains unknown whether the emotional expressions in official photos also reflect cultural ideals. One exception is Horiuchi, Komatsu, & Nakaya (2012), which compared the official photos of Japanese and Australian lower house legislators using a face recognition program, and found that Japanese smiled less intensely than did Australian politicians. The authors hypothesized that these differences might reflect different cultural values placed on smiling, but they did not empirically test this hypothesis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leaders’ smiles reflect cultural differences in ideal affect.

Tsai¹,

Ang²,

Blevins³

et al. 2016

Emotion

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Cultures differ in the emotions they teach their members to value (“ideal affect”). We conducted three studies to examine whether leaders’ smiles reflect these cultural differences in ideal affect. In Study 1, we compared the smiles of top ranked American and Chinese government leaders, chief-executive-officers (CEOs), and university presidents in their official photos. Consistent with findings that Americans value excitement and other high arousal positive states more than Chinese, American top ranked leaders (N = 98) showed more excited smiles than Chinese top ranked leaders (N = 91) across occupations. In Study 2, we compared the smiles of winning vs. losing political candidates and higher vs. lower ranking CEOs and university presidents in the US and Taiwan/China. American leaders (N = 223) showed more excited smiles than Taiwanese/Chinese leaders (N =266), regardless of election outcome or ranking. In Study 3, we administered self-report measures of ideal affect in college student samples from 10 different nations (N = 1,267) and then eight years later, coded the smiles that legislators from those nations showed in their official photos (N = 3,372). The more nations valued excitement and other high arousal positive states, the more their leaders showed excited smiles; similarly, the more nations valued calm and other low arousal positive states, the more their leaders showed calm smiles. These results held after controlling for national differences in GDP per capita, democratization, and human development. Together, these findings suggest that leaders’ smiles reflect the affective states valued by their cultures.

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“…In addition, smiling in a college yearbook was positively related with being married and negatively related with negative emotionality in adulthood (Harker & Keltner, 2001). Horiuchi, Komatsu, and Nakaya (2012) found on the sample of Australian and Japanese pictures of election candidates that in both countries, candidates who smiled had a significantly higher vote share than candidates who did not smile. One of the suggested explanations for this finding is according to the authors a possibility that voters associated smiling with political competence.…”

Section: Smile and Intelligence And Competencementioning

confidence: 94%

How to pose for a professional photo: The effect of three facial expressions on perception of competence of a software developer

Filkuková

Jørgensen

2020

Australian Journal of Psychology

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Objective: Prospective employers can nowadays easily access applicants' photos via Internet, for instance on professional and social networks or previous employers' websites. In our study, we investigated whether a facial expression in a picture affects evaluation of one's competence for a position where facial qualities are not crucial, namely a position of a software developer. Method: In Study 1, both "models" and participants were employed in IT companies. The experiment followed a 3 x 3 x 2 design, with facial expression (smile, neutral, and thinking) and evaluator's experience in hiring as betweensubjects factors and gender of the model as a within-subjects factor. Study 2 was a survey among software specialists where we investigated their awareness of the impact of applicant's face on the evaluation of his/her competence. Results: When the models smiled, they were perceived as more competent than when they had a neutral expression. When models adopted a thinking pose, they were evaluated as the least competent. Fifty-five percent of the sample was previously involved in hiring employees; the amount of hiring experience had no impact on this effect. Women were perceived as less competent than men and an interaction analysis revealed that this effect was driven by participants without prior experience in hiring. In Study 2, software specialists assigned a significant role in hiring decisions to the applicant's competent physical appearance, only 10% of participants thought that employers were hardly ever affected by the applicant's face. Conclusion: Facial expression in a photo affects perceived competence of applicants for a position of a software developer regardless of evaluators' prior hiring experience for this type of job.

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Should Candidates Smile to Win Elections? An Application of Automated Face Recognition Technology

Cited by 40 publications

References 13 publications

Tweets That Matter: Evidence From a Randomized Field Experiment in Japan

Tweets That Matter: Evidence From a Randomized Field Experiment in Japan

Leaders’ smiles reflect cultural differences in ideal affect.

How to pose for a professional photo: The effect of three facial expressions on perception of competence of a software developer

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