The first Republican primaries for the US presidential election kick off tomorrow in the state of Iowa – and with them will begin the ten-month parade of opinion polls, campaign ads, and televised debates that leads up to election day on 6 November.
However, behind the discussion of issues and party platforms are, of course, the individual candidates (eight Republicans and one Democrat).
And behind all of the conscious ways Americans are assessing them, science says that subconsciously our “gut feel” plays a measurable role in who we choose as elected leaders. The world over, we’re suckers for certain traits. So here are the traits – and candidates – that psychological studies say Americans will tick at the ballot box.
The tall one
It’s a rather obvious starting point, but the men elected president generally skew towards the tall end of average. In 2006, the average American man was 163 cm tall; in comparison the average height of American presidents over the last 50 years has been 184 cm.
A study published in October supported these anecdotal results with scientific ones. Psychologist Gregg Miller asked 467 students at American universities to describe and draw their ideal president alongside a typical citizen. Almost two-thirds of participants (64 per cent) drew the leader taller than the citizen.
Mitt Romney, the tall one
Miller’s study says this appears to be a psychological preference rather than a cultural one, as students from a wide range of nationalities displayed the same preference.
So, who’ll win?
In a contest of height amongst the Republicans, Mitt Romney (fourth from the left in the image linked here) appears to be winning.
At 188 cm, he edges out Barack Obama by about 3 cm.
The husky one
Recent research has found voters also prefer male candidates with deeper voices. (Because the research used archival recordings of US presidents, no women were included, but the team does plan to do future research into women politicians’ perceptions.)
Deep-voiced Jon Huntsman
The researchers digitally manipulated recordings of past presidents’ voices to make the pitch higher or lower. They then played both versions of each recording to 125 subjects, and asked them to rate,among other things, which they would vote for. The deeper-voiced version came out the winner.
So, who’ll win?
Jon Huntsman’s unexpectedly deep voice for his slight frame emerges victorious here.
The smiley one
A smile may be another trait that, like height, transcends borders. Research published in March in the journal Political Psychology used automated face-recognition technology to create a “smile index” for candidates’ faces. The researchers could thus isolate the smile’s qualities from more general considerations of facial appearance.
The study found that a greater “smile index” correlated to greater vote share for Japanese and Australian candidates in elections in 2000 and 2004, respectively. Furthermore, the percentage increase garnered by a full smile in Australia was greater than in Japan: smiling will increase your vote share by 2.3 percentage points in Japan, but as much as 5.2 percentage points in Australia.
So, who’ll win?
Smiling Barack Obama
The software looked at “key patterns common in smiling faces, such as how much the mouth and eyes are open, how the outer corners of the eyes are shaped, and how developed wrinkles around eyes, nose and mouth are”.
In other words, it mattered how real the smile was. On that basis, no contender beats the incumbent Obama, whose large smile (seen here) perhaps helped get him elected the first time around.
The one who looks like you
But ultimately, perhaps you won’t want a deep-voiced long-limbed smiling candidate – you’ll just want the one that looks most like you.
A 2008 study tested this prospect by subtly morphing faces. In one part of the experiment, just ahead of the 2004 election, voters were shown images of the two main candidates, George W. Bush and John Kerry. Unbeknownst to the subject, one of the images had been slightly morphed with their own face, and the other slightly morphed with a stranger’s face.
The effect didn’t work on all voters, but it did have an effect on weak partisans and independents, who significantly favoured the candidate with whom their own face had been morphed.
Another aspect of the study found that this effect was more likely if the candidates were unfamiliar to the voter.
So, if you’re going to vote for the next president of the United States – or, for that matter, anyone else – there’s no easy way around it. You had better bone up on your candidates – and on your subconscious biases – so that you can leave them at home when you head off to the ballot box.
Photo by KCIvey via Flickr