Voters Swayed By Candidates Who Share Their Looks 266
iandoh writes "Stanford researchers have found that voters are subconsciously swayed by candidates who share their facial features. In three experiments, researchers at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab worked with cheap, easy-to-use computer software to morph pictures of about 600 test subjects with photos of politicians. And they kept coming up with the same results: For the would-be voters who weren't very familiar with the candidates or in perfect lockstep with their positions or political parties, the facial similarity was enough to clinch their votes."
Re:Sad (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A new career beckons! (Score:3, Insightful)
Bush won because he can supposedly relate to joe sixpack. This seems pretty similar.
Re:Mark this article (Score:3, Insightful)
It drives me nuts that Slashdotters always bring up "correlation does not imply causation" any time any sort of experiment is mentioned even if no one is even trying to assert a causative relationship.
"Correlation does not imply causation" seems to be one of those ideas that a lot of people seem to somehow be proud of knowing and as such try to apply even when they aren't needed. Other examples of these sorts of ideas on Slashdot are the term "prior art" and car analogies.
Re:Mark this article (Score:5, Insightful)
Undecided Voters Swayed by Candidates Who Share Their Looks
But then,
Hey -- There's your idea for a social experiment!
Re:Mark this article (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been shown that people are more attracted to people with similar facial features when choosing mates, it makes some sense that people would feel better about choosing a leader with similar facial features for the same biological reasons.
Now I'm not saying that this hypothesis is clearly true, just that we don't have to jump all over it.
Re:So would Tina Fey vote for Sarah Palin? (Score:1, Insightful)
Frankly, I kind of doubt it. But you never know...
It'd keep her in business though...
Re:Mark this article (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, causality is something that a lot of very smart statisticians do spend a lot of time studying. It's not inconceivable that in the future people will be able to make concrete statistical statements about causality with confidence intervals and the works. What will the mantra be then?
Anyway, correlation's not *that* good of a measure of (interesting and nonlinear) dependence between (non-Gaussian) variables anyway. Mutual information is the ticket.
Ok, done with my rant.
Re:Mark this article (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A new career beckons! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah I meant generally ignorant of the world he lives in, pretty stupid, probably can't stay awake during a meeting on the economy or science, and is no where near qualified to run a country.
Re:Sad (Score:2, Insightful)
I've heard statistics from some sources as high as 97% of black voters will be voting for Obama, just google for some of it it's out there. Even if they're off and lets say it's only 85%, still.
If 85% of white people voted for McCain, it would be considered racist.
It would only be racist if they vote for him only because he's white. So why is black people voting for Obama different? Exactly because there's never been a black president yet. So far, the presidency has always been reserved for a white elite. People want to believe that skin colour has nothing to do with your ability to become president, and having a president with a different skin colour would be the ultimate proof of that.
Had I been allowed to vote, this would definitely be a factor for me (although I'm as white, blond haired and blue eyed as you can get), although it's a lot easier to say this about someone who is smart, collected and rational. I wouldn't have been as eager to vote for Jesse Jackson, for example.
(Obama isn't even all that black; he's half white, raised by white mother and grandparents, and even his father doesn't have Afro-American roots. Even so, I have little doubt his presidency would open a lot of doors.)
And what does this mean in the real world? (Score:3, Insightful)
In order for the test to work (correct me if I'm wrong), the only factor that they would have been told is that they were voting for a politician in an experiment. When people have nothing else to make a decision on, they will generally try to pick something, no matter how superficial it may seem.
But when voting for someone in the real world, more factors come into play and this test doesn't say anything about how much of an influence this trait plays, which is just as important as the experiment itself if you want to find out what it means in real elections.
Re:I can confirm from my work. (Score:3, Insightful)
Gah... why does everyone try to lower the standard for communication or culture. You take the cussing, spitting broads, I'll take the considerate (calculating?) well-mannered women. I like being around people who try to improve their manner, speech and character.
Re:Mark this article (Score:3, Insightful)
Where does the correlation come from then? Unless you suggest that people who look the same ACTUALLY have the same political views.
The correlationisnotcausation tag really winds me up because correlation DOES imply causation. If A and B are correlated then either A causes B, B causes A, or C causes both A and B (or it's a chance finding but that's what p-values are for). So once you have a correlation its just a case of working out which causal relationship is true. I'll leave this specific case as an exercise for the reader.
Re:Mark this article (Score:3, Insightful)
And rightly so.
Most science stories posted to Slashdot are junk science studies which use the law of large numbers and fuzzy statistics to promote the most dubious of arguments under the pretence of scientific inquiry. Many studies take correlation coefficients of 0.5 to be "significant". What a joke. How long is the scientific community going to continue to call this rigour?
Rubbish! Is that what the world construes from their results? Is that what they wish the world to construe from them? No. The vast majority of these studies are putting forward their correlation as proof of causation. That is what they want people to construe from the study. Look at any half baked studies on race, gender, abortion or any topic that sells newspapers. Why do you think people are performing such studies? Because they believe further inquiry is merited? No. It's because they have an opinion, and want to justify it. So they turn to science to legitimise their position. This constant and ongoing abuse of science is sickening.
Slashdotters are right to point out the Correlation is not, and never will be causation. Never, never, never, never, never. If you want to show causation, then you must have a model and you must subject it to experiment. Experiment! Not statistical mumbo-jumbo.
Listen to Zombie Feynman's wisdom. [xkcd.com] "Ideas are tested by experiment. Everything else is bookkeeping". This is bookkeeping, not science. Correlation is not causation, and this story deserves that tag. I don't know how many times I'm going to end up linking to this page, but here it is again. This study is Cargo Cult Science [pd.infn.it]. The form is perfect, but it is only an empty imitation of real scientific inquiry. Stop giving it more credit and credence that it deserves.
Re:Mark this article (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdotters are right to point out the Correlation is not, and never will be causation. Never, never, never, never, never. If you want to show causation, then you must have a model and you must subject it to experiment. Experiment! Not statistical mumbo-jumbo.
I think you are wrong. Epidemiology and observational science have given up a lot without the need for experimentation (we know smoking causes lung cancer, though this has never been directly established through an experiment, since it would be massively unethical). Correlation does imply causation, as I've pointed out in an earlier comment, the hard part is working out what the causal relationships are (ie A->B, B->A or C->A and C->B, these are the ONLY explanations for statistically significant correlation).
The reverse possibility B->A here is nonsense, because voting patterns cannot affect your looks, and the way this study was conducted (you can read the details) pretty well rules out the confounding factor 'C', leaving us with A->B as the only plausible explanation.
I'd like to see you try to refute this (without resorting to insults or rhetoric), particularly if you can think of a way for variables to be correlated without some form of causal relationship as I've described.
Re:Mark this article (Score:2, Insightful)
No. There are people who will vote for their party, even if they put a horse's ass up for election. No "decision" is made.
I can give you an example, but George Bush probably feels bad enough about now, what with the country practically a flaming ruin as he prepares to leave office. But, I suppose there are some that look at the results of his presidency and say "Mission Accomplished".
Re:Mark this article (Score:3, Insightful)
"Correlation is not causation" is the new "FUD" - it's something people can yell when they dislike something but can't figure out how to refute it, without ever really understanding that the term has an actual, specific meaning.
Not that weird (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course you'll trust someone which looks like they is from your family / closely related more than someone who's not.
Makes perfect sense and makes me wonder why some people decided that "correlationisnotcausation" was a valid tag for this story. Would be intresting to hear their theory about why this happens if it's not because of the similar looks ...
Re:Sad (Score:3, Insightful)
Guess what, someone in another thread is complaining about the overuse of "correlation is not causation", and here you go with a fine example of correlation having nothing to do with causation. The black vote has always been for the democrats in the last decades, and this time the democrat candidate happens to be black (halfway at least).
Since 90% of the blacks are voting for the presidential ticket with no women, are you inferring that blacks don't like boobs?
Nope. McCain will get the votes... (Score:1, Insightful)
...of most all the older voters (over 40 yrs old).
And, there's slightly more of those age group than there are of under-40 voters when you measure strictly by age.
This election is going to be a lot tighter than most folks think.
Be worried.
Re:Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
What is that you were saying again?
Right, because WHITE (R) people don't like any BLACK people.
Could it be that more blacks aren't (R) because of the hatred spewed against those few black people who are (R)? The vile vitriol spewed against people like Clarance Thomas and Michael Steele is simply amazing.
Also, look at who the NAACP supports, and in cases where it is a white (D) vs a black (R), they go with the white (D) everytime. I guess it color only counts if you're a (D), huh?
Re:Saturn and S&P Correlated (Score:4, Insightful)
OK first thanks for taking me seriously. I am actually quite flattered that there is now a webpage dedicated to describing how much of an idiot I am.
I also hope you have the good grace to post my rebuttal to both your arguments, first that science cannot be conducted without experiments, and second that correlation does not equal causation. You have my permission to publish this so long as you do so in its entirity.
I'm going to give you a short CV, just so you know (not sure it's relevant but anyway). I have a degree in mathematics, a masters degree in mathematical statistics, a PhD in evolutionary biology (my thesis topic was along the lines of 'what can we infer from comparisons of gene orders of extant species') and I've worked for four years as an epidemiologist on a observational study of health and cognition. It's fair to say that over the past ten years I've thought about the ideas of correlation, causation, and inference for a living. If I had any doubt that what I was doing was fundementally flawed from a scientific point of view I wouldn't do it.
Regarding your Saturn example, well you've managed to find two things that increase with time, but are quite clearly unrelated in every other regard. You have calculated their correlation as 0.88, suggested that I would draw the conclusion that one causes the other, which is plainly absurd, therefore my argument that correlation implies causation is incorrect.
There are two ways I will respond.
The most obvious is that you did not read my argument. I claimed A->B, OR B->A, OR C->A and C->B. Clearly here we have a correlation, so one of these must be true. A->B and B ->A are both obviously silly, so we are left with C->A and C->B. Well what could 'C' be? Here it helps that you've not plotted A vs B as would be traditional to illustrate a correlation, but you've helpfully plotted A and B against a third factor, 'time'. In this case C=time, the passing of time has caused the stock market to increase and has caused Saturn to do whatever it did (I'm not an astronomer). If you do a regression of A vs B adjusting for time I'd be pretty sure you'll see the correlation would be gone.
Second, (and this is a more minor subtle complaint) there is the issue of statistical significance. I don't know but I'd bet the correlation you showed does not hold much outside of the small window you've showed it, and that you've selected this particular example to illustrate your point. If you give me any two time series I could probably find a small window in which they are both increasing, so that correlation is statistically meaningless because of multiple testing issues (note I qualified my initial claim with the words 'statistically significant')
Next, I absolutely agree with you that experimentation is the gold standard of scientific research. I cannot accept however that it is the only way to draw conclusions. Much of science cannot be tested experimentally because it would be impractical, unethical (as with most of the work I do) or just plain silly. My earlier example 'lung cancer is caused by smoking' is a good example of a purely observation finding that was totally unexpected at the time and was found simply on the basis of observing the smoking patterns of people in lung cancer wards compared with others. The big prospective studies came much later, and experiments will never be done, yet I'm sure you would accept this finding as true.
I also agree with you that most science posted on Slashdot is rubbish, for a variety of reasons, mostly because science progresses in very small increments, and so on its own no paper is ever really newsworthy, and has to have its significance bloated out of all proportion to get into the news (ie they fail the 'so what' test). However faulty causation is not often the culprit, because most scientists are very good at adjusting for potential confounders in their relationships (and journals are very go