Abstract
AbstractRecent research has indicated that judgments of competence based on very short exposure to political candidates’ faces reliably predict electoral success. An unexplored question is whether presenting written information of the kind to which voters are typically exposed during an election alongside candidates’ faces affects competence judgments. We conducted three studies using photographs of 16 pairs of competing politicians in 16 medium-sized towns of northeast Italy as stimuli. Study 1 confirmed the external validity of earlier research in which participants were exposed to candidates’ faces without providing any other information. Study 2a showed that competence judgments were not subject to in-group favoritism: candidates’ faces were presented alongside information about the political coalition to which they belonged (center left; center right) to participants who declared a left or right political orientation. Finally, Study 2c compared the competence inferences made in Study 1 (face-only con...
Highlights
In order to explain voting behavior, modern political scientists have mostly assumed that citizens are rational actors, making choices based on relevant information, while being unaffected by irrelevant cues (Kuklinski & Quirk, 2000; Quattrone & Tversky, 1988)
Olivola et al (2012) demonstrated a political facial bias amongst right-leaning electors, which can be seen as another example, in the political domain, of classical in-group favoritism (Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Turner, 1985; more recently Eriksson & Funcke, 2015); our aim was to assess whether brief verbal information—about political affiliation or campaign promises—positioned below an image of a candidate’s face would influence left- and right-leaning participants’ competence judgments
In order to assess whether judgments by people from central Italy based solely on candidates’ faces predict election outcomes in northeast Italy, we correlated perceived competence judgments with the actual election outcome
Summary
In order to explain voting behavior, modern political scientists have mostly assumed that citizens are rational actors, making choices based on relevant information, while being unaffected by irrelevant cues (Kuklinski & Quirk, 2000; Quattrone & Tversky, 1988). There is mounting evidence that in order to cope with the complexity of life human beings routinely rely on heuristics and automatic information processing and make relatively parsimonious use of more reflective ways of thinking (System 1s and 2; Kahneman, 2003; Kahneman & Frederick, 2002; Lieberman, McBratney, & Krovitz, 2002; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986; Sloman, 1986) Consistent with these notions, research in the political domain has revealed that voters are usually not well informed about policies (Converse, 1964; Zaller, 1992), do not understand economic issues (Bartels, 2005; Caplan, 2007), have idiosyncratic view of ideological differences (Conover & Feldman, 1981) and inconsistent preferences (Quattrone & Tversky, 1988), and largely predicate their evaluation of political candidates and political issues on emotions (Lodge & Taber, 2005). Explicit instructions to make a judgment based on careful deliberations elicit competence judgments that are less predictive of electoral outcomes than those made rapidly and intuitively between 250 and 2,000 ms (Ballew & Todorov, 2007, Study 2)
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