Beauty or the Beast? The Effects of Appearance, Personality, and Issue Information on Evaluations of Political Candidates

Budesheim, Thomas Lee; DePaola, Stephen J.

doi:10.1177/0146167294204001

Cited by 74 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…This suggests that visual appearance may affect what individuals think about politicians, regardless of policy and good argument. Indeed, in line with many positive attributions to attractive individuals (Dion et al, 1972), one study shows that attractive political candidates are evaluated more positively than unattractive individuals (Budesheim and Depaola, 1994). As the individual traits of politicians become increasingly important (Caprara and Zimbardo, 2004), and with politicians' increasing use of visual media, we might expect that the appearance of candidates' faces will be increasingly likely to play a critical role in voter choice.…”

Section: Facial Appearancementioning

confidence: 94%

Evolution, Appearance, and Occupational Success

Little

Roberts

2012

Evol Psychol

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Visual characteristics, including facial appearance, are thought to play an important role in a variety of judgments and decisions that have real occupational outcomes in many settings. Indeed, there is growing evidence suggesting that appearance influences hiring decisions and even election results. For example, attractive individuals are more likely to be hired, taller men earn more, and the facial appearance of candidates has been linked to real election outcomes. In this article, we review evidence linking physical appearance to occupational success and evaluate the hypothesis that appearance based biases are consistent with predictions based on evolutionary theories of coalition formation and leadership choice. We discuss why appearance based effects are so pervasive, addressing ideas about a "kernel of truth" in attributions and about coalitional psychology. We additionally highlight that appearance may be differently related to success at work according to the types of job or task involved. For example, leaders may be chosen because the characteristics they possess are seen as best suited to lead in particular situations. During a time of war, a dominant-appearing leader may inspire confidence and intimidate enemies while during peace-time, when negotiation and diplomacy are needed, interpersonal skills may outweigh the value of a dominant leader. In line with these ideas, masculine-faced leaders are favored in war-time scenarios while feminine-faced leaders are favored in peace-time scenarios. We suggest that such environment or task specific competencies may be prevalent during selection processes, whereby individuals whose appearance best matches perceived task competences are most likely selected, and propose the general term "task-congruent selection" to describe these effects. Overall, our review highlights how potentially adaptive biases could influence choices in the work place. With respect to certain biases, understanding their origin and current prevalence is important in order to potentially reduce discrimination in the work place.

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Section: Facial Appearancementioning

confidence: 94%

Evolution, Appearance, and Occupational Success

Little

Roberts

2012

Evol Psychol

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“…Attractiveness reflects health in both sexes and fertility in women (18), making more attractive people more valuable as sexual partners, mates, and allies (all else equal). Indeed, it is widely documented that more weight is placed on the welfare of attractive people: They are paid more (19), are more likely to be hired for managerial positions (20), are more likely to be elected to public office (21), are given lighter sentences (22,23), and are viewed more favorably (24). Attractive people should, *The welfare weighting function should generate a relationship-specific vector-the WTR function-that, for each absolute magnitude of sacrifice potentially made by the actor, produces a WTR-a variable that defines the ratio of the weights placed on the welfare of the actor versus the target, in determining as a decision-making threshold the maximum sacrifice the actor will make for the target.…”

Section: Engineering Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Formidability and the logic of human anger

Sell

Tooby

Cosmides

2009

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

687

677

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Eleven predictions derived from the recalibrational theory of anger were tested. This theory proposes that anger is produced by a neurocognitive program engineered by natural selection to use bargaining tactics to resolve conflicts of interest in favor of the angry individual. The program is designed to orchestrate two interpersonal negotiating tactics (conditionally inflicting costs or conditionally withholding benefits) to incentivize the target of the anger to place greater weight on the welfare of the angry individual. Individuals with enhanced abilities to inflict costs (e.g., stronger individuals) or to confer benefits (e.g., attractive individuals) have a better bargaining position in conflicts; hence, it was predicted that such individuals will be more prone to anger, prevail more in conflicts of interest, and consider themselves entitled to better treatment. These predictions were confirmed. Consistent with an evolutionary analysis, the effect of strength on anger was greater for men and the effect of attractiveness on anger was greater for women. Also as predicted, stronger men had a greater history of fighting than weaker men, and more strongly endorsed the efficacy of force to resolve conflicts-both in interpersonal and international conflicts. The fact that stronger men favored greater use of military force in international conflicts provides evidence that the internal logic of the anger program reflects the ancestral payoffs characteristic of a small-scale social world rather than rational assessments of modern payoffs in large populations.aggression ͉ evolutionary psychology ͉ recalibrational theory ͉ welfare tradeoff ratio A nger is part of the basic biology of the human species. It spontaneously appears in infancy (1, 2), is effectively universal in its distribution across cultures and individuals (3, 4), and has a species-typical neural basis (5). To understand the evolutionary biology of anger, however, it is also important to characterize its evolved function-that is, what (if anything) was anger engineered by natural selection to accomplish? A recent model-the recalibrational theory of anger-hypothesizes that the regulatory program governing anger evolved in the service of bargaining, to resolve conflicts of interest in favor of the angry individual (6, 7). More precisely, the function of anger is to orchestrate behavior in the angry individual that creates incentives in the target of the anger to recalibrate upwards the weight he or she puts on the welfare of the angry individual. Here, we report empirical tests of 11 predictions derived from this model. Engineering AnalysisAnger, Welfare Tradeoff Ratios (WTRs), and Bargaining. In social species, actions undertaken by one individual commonly have impacts on the welfare of others (measured in fitness, or in other currencies). Consequently, neurocognitive programs in social species should have been designed by selection to solve the following computational adaptive problem: For a given choice set involving self and other, how much weight shou...

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“…The happy/angry confusion could indicate that people have a general scanpath routine for classifying emotional facial expressions, potentially involving more frequently looking at the mouth than for other tasks (see Table 2). Several studies have shown that human judgments of appearance and trustworthiness are correlated (Budesheim & DePaola, 1994;Zaidel, Bava, & Reis, 2003;Kleisner et al, 2013), and this may be the reason why the scanpaths for attractiveness and trustworthiness are more frequently confused by the algorithms. The confusion matrices shown in Fig.…”

Section: Agreementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humans have idiosyncratic and task-specific scanpaths for judging faces

et al. 2015

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a b s t r a c tSince Yarbus's seminal work, vision scientists have argued that our eye movement patterns differ depending upon our task. This has recently motivated the creation of multi-fixation pattern analysis algorithms that try to infer a person's task (or mental state) from their eye movements alone. Here, we introduce new algorithms for multi-fixation pattern analysis, and we use them to argue that people have scanpath routines for judging faces. We tested our methods on the eye movements of subjects as they made six distinct judgments about faces. We found that our algorithms could detect whether a participant is trying to distinguish angriness, happiness, trustworthiness, tiredness, attractiveness, or age. However, our algorithms were more accurate at inferring a subject's task when only trained on data from that subject than when trained on data gathered from other subjects, and we were able to infer the identity of our subjects using the same algorithms. These results suggest that (1) individuals have scanpath routines for judging faces, and that (2) these are diagnostic of that subject, but that (3) at least for the tasks we used, subjects do not converge on the same ''ideal'' scanpath pattern. Whether universal scanpath patterns exist for a task, we suggest, depends on the task's constraints and the level of expertise of the subject.

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Beauty or the Beast? The Effects of Appearance, Personality, and Issue Information on Evaluations of Political Candidates

Cited by 74 publications

References 28 publications

Evolution, Appearance, and Occupational Success

Evolution, Appearance, and Occupational Success

Formidability and the logic of human anger

Humans have idiosyncratic and task-specific scanpaths for judging faces

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