Cultural effects on the association between election outcomes and face-based trait inferences.

Chujun Lin,Ralph Adolphs,R Michael Alvarez,Nouchine Hadjikhani

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0180837

Abstract

How competent a politician looks, as assessed in the laboratory, is correlated with whether the politician wins in real elections. This finding has led many to investigate whether the association between candidate appearances and election outcomes transcends cultures. However, these studies have largely focused on European countries and Caucasian candidates. To the best of our knowledge, there are only four cross-cultural studies that have directly investigated how face-based trait inferences correlate with election outcomes across Caucasian and Asian cultures. These prior studies have provided some initial evidence regarding cultural differences, but methodological problems and inconsistent findings have complicated our understanding of how culture mediates the effects of candidate appearances on election outcomes. Additionally, these four past studies have focused on positive traits, with a relative neglect of negative traits, resulting in an incomplete picture of how culture may impact a broader range of trait inferences. To study Caucasian-Asian cultural effects with a more balanced experimental design, and to explore a more complete profile of traits, here we compared how Caucasian and Korean participants’ inferences of positive and negative traits correlated with U.S. and Korean election outcomes. Contrary to previous reports, we found that inferences of competence (made by participants from both cultures) correlated with both U.S. and Korean election outcomes. Inferences of open-mindedness and threat, two traits neglected in previous cross-cultural studies, were correlated with Korean but not U.S. election outcomes. This differential effect was found in trait judgments made by both Caucasian and Korean participants. Interestingly, the faster the participants made face-based trait inferences, the more strongly those inferences were correlated with real election outcomes. These findings provide new insights into cultural effects and the difficult question of causality underlying the association between facial inferences and election outcomes. We also discuss the implications for political science and cognitive psychology.

Highlights

Numerous studies have reported that trait inferences made by participants who had no previous knowledge of the political candidates, and who looked at the candidates’ photos for as briefly as 100 milliseconds, correlate with real election outcomes [1,2,3,4]
Subsequent research has examined how these face-based trait evaluations might be associated with election outcomes in other countries than the U.S Supportive evidence reinforcing the original results has been found in Britain [6,7,8,9], Germany [10,11], France [12], Finland [13], Ireland [15], Switzerland [16], Bulgaria [17], Denmark [18], Italy [19], Australia [9, 20], New Zealand [9], Brazil [21], Mexico [21], Japan [22], China [23], and Taiwan (ROC) [24, 25]
We found that the traits that were most strongly associated with election outcomes differed between U.S and Korean elections, but that the associations were consistent across both Caucasian and Korean participants

Summary

Introduction

Numerous studies have reported that trait inferences made by participants who had no previous knowledge of the political candidates, and who looked at the candidates’ photos for as briefly as 100 milliseconds, correlate with real election outcomes [1,2,3,4]. This was initially studied for Australian elections [5] and was made most popular by the later studies for U.S elections [1,2,3]. Our present study focused on direct comparisons between Caucasian and Asian cultures, and on traits that are closely related to the initial study [5] (e.g., competence)

Methods

Results

Conclusion