Winning Faces Vary by Ideology: How Nonverbal Source Cues Influence Election and Communication Success in Politics

Laustsen, Lasse; Petersen, Michael Bang

doi:10.1080/10584609.2015.1050565

Cited by 75 publications

(96 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Consistent with the findings presented above, subjects are significantly less likely to vote for the dominant individual in the absence of contextual information, and they are significantly more likely to vote for the dominant candidate in the face of conflict than in its absence. This is in line with a prior study analyzing actual election results, which found that a candidate's appearance in terms of dominance was associated with the number of votes he or she actually received (Laustsen and Petersen 2016). At the same time, and consistent with existing evidence, the analysis of the present data shows that the effects are weaker for vote choice compared to evaluations.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 92%

Online Tallies and the Context of Politics: How Online Tallies Make Dominant Candidates Appear Competent in Contexts of Conflict

Laustsen

Petersen

2019

American J Political Sci

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In this article, we extend the classical notion of online tallies to shed light on the psychology underlying the rapid emergence of dominant political leaders. Predicated on two population‐based panel surveys with embedded experiments, we demonstrate that citizens (1) store extremely durable tallies of candidate personalities in their long‐term memory and (2) retrieve different tallies depending on the context. In particular, we predict and demonstrate that when contexts become more conflict‐ridden, candidate evaluations rapidly shift from being negatively to positively associated with online impressions of candidate dominance. Although the notion of online tallies was originally proposed as an explanation of why citizens are able to vote for candidates on the basis of policy agreement, we demonstrate how the existence of context‐sensitive online tallies can favor dominant candidates, even if the candidate is otherwise unappealing or does not share policy views with citizens on key issues.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 92%

Online Tallies and the Context of Politics: How Online Tallies Make Dominant Candidates Appear Competent in Contexts of Conflict

Laustsen

Petersen

2019

American J Political Sci

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“…Sixth, as OSTKT previously noted, the fact that political facial stereotypes predict the preferences of voters on one side of the political spectrum but not the other also differentiates them from other kinds of faced‐based social attributions, such as facial competence, which attracts the votes of both conservative and liberal voters (Lenz & Lawson, ; Olivola et al, ), or facial dominance, which some studies have shown is a positive predictor of conservative votes and a negative predictor of liberal votes (e.g., Laustsen & Petersen, ). To the best of our knowledge, there are only two other demonstrations of such an asymmetry (between political parties) within real elections.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“… Laustsen and Petersen (), in one of their studies, also obtained evidence suggesting that people are more likely to select leaders with faces that stereotypically fit their preferred political ideology. However, their stimuli were not the faces of actual politicians (they presented participants with two computerized avatar faces), and the hypothetical “voting” context in their study was unrelated to modern politics (participants were asked to imagine living in a tribe in the jungle and indicated which of the two avatars they would prefer to lead the tribe in trying to solve a particular problem).…”

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Republican Voters Prefer Candidates Who Have Conservative‐Looking Faces: New Evidence From Exit Polls

Olivola

Tingley

Todorov

2018

Political Psychology

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Research shows people share common political facial stereotypes: They associate faces with political ideologies. Moreover, given that many voters rely on party affiliation, political ideology, and appearances to select political candidates, we might expect that political facial stereotypes would sway voting preferences and, by extension, the share of votes going to each candidate in an election. And yet few studies have examined whether having a stereotypically conservative-looking (or liberal-looking) face predicts a candidate's vote shares. Using data from U.S. election exit polls, we show that the Republican voters within each state are more likely to vote for a candidate (even a Democrat) the more that person has a stereotypically Republican-looking face. By contrast, the voting choices of the Democratic voters within each state are unrelated to political facial stereotypes. Moreover, we show that the relationship between political facial stereotypes and voting does not depend on state-level ideology: Republican voters in both right-leaning ("red") and left-leaning ("blue") states are more likely to vote for candidates with conservative-looking faces. These results have several important practical and theoretical implications concerning the nature and impact of political facial stereotypes, which we discuss.

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“…(student's t-test difference of means, p > .05 13 ; relatively disparaging 14 : East Asian ancestry, 28.8%; non-Asian ancestry, 32.3%) 11 Considerable research investigates the influence of nonverbal cues on people. For examples, see Barisione and Iyengar (2016); Laustsen and Petersen (2016); and Olivola, Tingley, and Todorov (2018). 12 See Appendix S2 in the online supporting information for a discussion of the manipulation checks on this experiment.…”

Section: Disparagement Judgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taming Uncivil Discourse

Gibson

Epstein

Magarian

2019

Political Psychology

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In an era of seemingly intense populist politics, a variety of issues of intergroup prejudice, discrimination, and conflict have moved center stage in much of the industrialized world. Among these is “political correctness” and, in particular, what constitutes a legitimate discourse of political and social conflict and opposition. Yet the meaning of legitimate discourse is being turned on its head as some disparaged groups seek to reclaim, or reappropriate, slurs directed against them. Using as a context a U.S. Supreme Court case about whether “The Slants”—a band named after a traditional slur against Asians—can trademark its name, we test several hypotheses about reappropriation processes based on a nationally representative sample with an oversample of East Asian Americans and several survey experiments. We find that motives attributions influence how people understand and evaluate potentially disparaging words. In particular, when reappropriation motives are perceived, insulting words are judged to be less insulting. In this sense, uncivil discourse can to some degree be tamed.

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Winning Faces Vary by Ideology: How Nonverbal Source Cues Influence Election and Communication Success in Politics

Cited by 75 publications

References 61 publications

Online Tallies and the Context of Politics: How Online Tallies Make Dominant Candidates Appear Competent in Contexts of Conflict

Online Tallies and the Context of Politics: How Online Tallies Make Dominant Candidates Appear Competent in Contexts of Conflict

Republican Voters Prefer Candidates Who Have Conservative‐Looking Faces: New Evidence From Exit Polls

Taming Uncivil Discourse

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