A neural basis for the effect of candidate appearance on election outcomes

Abstract

Election outcomes correlate with judgments based on a candidate's visual appearance, suggesting that the attributions viewers make based on appearance, so-called thin-slice judgments, influence voting. Yet, it is not known whether the effect of appearance on voting is more strongly influenced by positive or negative attributions, nor which neural mechanisms subserve this effect. We conducted two independent brain imaging studies to address this question. In Study 1, images of losing candidates elicited greater activation in the insula and ventral anterior cingulate than images of winning candidates. Winning candidates elicited no differential activation at all. This suggests that negative attributions from appearance exert greater influence on voting than do positive. We further tested this hypothesis in Study 2 by asking a separate group of participants to judge which unfamiliar candidate in a pair looked more attractive, competent, deceitful and threatening. When negative attribution processing was enhanced (specifically, under judgment of threat), images of losing candidates again elicited greater activation in the insula and ventral anterior cingulate. Together, these findings support the view that negative attributions play a critical role in mediating the effects of appearance on voter decisions, an effect that may be of special importance when other information is absent.

Automatic processing of political preferences in the human brain

“…Research has begun to investigate neural activation that underlies the processing of political attitudes and preferences (Amodio et al, 2007;Zamboni et al, 2009), including studies on deliberative processing of political statements and simulated voting for political candidates (Westen et al, 2006;Spezio et al, 2008;Gozzi et al, 2010;Bruneau and Saxe, 2010;Rule et al, 2010).Yet the neural substrate underlying automatic processing of political preferences (Todorov et al, 2005;Ballew and Todorov, 2007;Berger et al, 2008;Galdi et al, 2008;Hassin et al, 2007;Carter et al, 2011;Healy et al, 2010) remains largely unstudied. Extending earlier fMRI studies, the present studyshowed that brain responses can reflect individual political preferences -for politicians and associated parties -in the absence of conscious deliberation and attention.…”

“…Moreover, the results of a multiplechoice questionnaire of party affiliations showed that facial appearance of unfamiliar politicians did not allow identification of the associated political party above chance. Face-specific ratings obtained in pretest 2 also allowed selection of stimuli that were matched across experimental conditions with respect to judgments of facial attractiveness, trait inferences such as trustworthiness, competence, and threat, as well as valuation ratings for politicians ( Figure 1A) (Winston et al, 2002;Todorov et al, 2005;Engell et al, 2007;O'Doherty et al, 2003;Spezio et al, 2008;van 't Wout and Sanfey, 2008). Please note that similar face-specific ratings were collected for participants subsequent to scanning to validate the results of the behavioral pretests.…”

“…We hypothesized that preferences for politicians might be encoded in brain areas such as the ventral striatum (VS), the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and the 3 insula that have previously been shown to be involved in automatic valuation and incidental processing of popularity of socially tagged stimuli (Kim et al, 2007;Lebreton et al, 2009;Mason et al, 2009, Tusche et al, 2010.Following up on findings that preferences for politicians can be predicted based on rapid inferences from viewing their faces, we assumed thatjudgments based on the visual appearance of political candidates might mediate these preference judgments (Todorov et al, 2005;Ballew and Todorov, 2007;Spezio et al, 2008;Antonakis and Dalgas, 2009). Given the human capacity of rapid face recognition and automatic retrieval of person knowledge Todorov et al, 2007), we further hypothesized that task-irrelevant images of prominent politicians might automatically activate mental representations ofaffiliatedparties.…”

Lateral Orbitofrontal Cortex Links Social Impressions to Political Choices

“…This ranges from assessment of traits that are related directly to appearance, such as attractiveness (Thornhill and Gangestad, 1999;O'Doherty et al, 2003;, to inferences about personal characteristics, such as intelligence, warmth, or neuroticism (Berry, 1989;Zebrowitz et al, 2002;Bar et al, 2006;Penton-Voak et al, 2006;Little and Perrett, 2007). Although inferences based on appearance can be inaccurate (Olivola and Todorov, 2010), first impressions nonetheless can strongly influence social decision-making (Hassin and Trope, 2000;Bhanji and Beer, 2013).…”

“…It has also been linked to the assessment of social information from photographs or videos (O'Doherty et al, 2003;Willis et al, 2010;Tsuchida and Fellows, 2012;Bhanji and Beer, 2013), including the judgment of beauty (or esthetic value) in faces (Pegors et al, 2015).…”