At Face Value
Want to know who’s going to win the U.S. election in 2008? Forget approval polls. Tune out the talking heads who drone on about Iraq and candidates’ healthcare plans. The most successful method of predicting election outcomes may be pure gut instinct. In a recent experiment at Harvard University, students were shown silent, 10-second clips ...
Want to know who's going to win the U.S. election in 2008? Forget approval polls. Tune out the talking heads who drone on about Iraq and candidates' healthcare plans. The most successful method of predicting election outcomes may be pure gut instinct.
Want to know who’s going to win the U.S. election in 2008? Forget approval polls. Tune out the talking heads who drone on about Iraq and candidates’ healthcare plans. The most successful method of predicting election outcomes may be pure gut instinct.
In a recent experiment at Harvard University, students were shown silent, 10-second clips of gubernatorial debates from more than four dozen recent elections that were unfamiliar to them, and then asked to predict the victor. Economists Daniel Benjamin and Jesse Shapiro found that intuition successfully singled out victorious candidates 58 percent of the time — or significantly more often than chance. Going on instinct was also more reliable for picking winners than many economic factors, such as unemployment and income, that pundits routinely trot out to predict elections.
The results seem to imply that physical attractiveness gives candidates an edge. But the authors believe the reality is more nuanced: Students were also asked to rate candidates’ attractiveness, and those deemed more attractive weren’t necessarily those who were chosen as the likely winner. That suggests people "judge the appearance of leadership quality," says Shapiro. In other words, participants, the authors wrote, can "detect candidates’ own confidence in their prospects for victory."
That confidence may influence voters far more than actual policy positions. When sound was added to the short clips, participants’ ability to guess election outcomes actually worsened, suggesting that policy pitches interfered — negatively — with judgment. It may mean that voters are far from "hyperrational," according to Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania. "Presumably, political parties understand this, which is why they always put up candidates with good hair." Perhaps it’s simply that voters like their candidates seen, and not heard.
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