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  Do voters take politicians at 'face' value?
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Last EditedRP  Oct 23, 2007 08:50pm
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CategoryStudy
MediaNewspaper - USA Today
News DateMonday, October 22, 2007 10:00:00 PM UTC0:0
DescriptionCandidates campaign on the issues, but new research shows some people are swayed by looks alone.

Although rendering a snap judgment on a candidate's competence with just a quick glance may seem a superficial way to judge people, a Princeton University study finds that such reasoning accurately predicted election outcomes in about 70% of gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races last year.

The research, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was based on experiments involving about 300 people who didn't know anything about the candidates whose photos they were shown. Participants had a split-second look at the images and were asked to render a "gut feeling" about who was more competent. The new study supports research Todorov published two years ago in the journal Science.

If participants recognized any faces, that data were removed to ensure that the decisions were based on facial appearance alone. The study looked only at races in which the candidates matched in gender and ethnicity.
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