The Right Faces for Right-Wing and Left-Wing Politicians

Researchers of the baby-face stereotype maintain that having a more adult-looking face contributes to success in the political arena. However, this hypothesis has not been confirmed in previous research. This study suggests that more mature faces will be beneficial only for left-wing politicians whose public perception suffers from the appearance of a lack of dominance. Furthermore, with regard to only left-wing politicians, we also hypothesized that the maturity of their faces would indirectly lead to greater intentions to vote for them and acceptance of their attitudes. An experiment conducted in the context of municipal elections in Israel confirms these hypotheses. During Israel’s 2015 national election, the Labor party, headed by Yitzhak Herzog, faced a close race against the right-wing Likud party and its leader and incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Fearing that Herzog’s boyish looks might cost Labor the elections, his campaign team photoshopped his poster image to give him some gravitas (Cheslow, 2015). Altering his head’s height to width ratio to make him look less baby-faced did not win him the election, but the fact that he approved these visual modifications is telling. In today’s society in which we are surrounded by visual images presented by many media channels, it is not surprising that the looks of political candidates have a major impact on election outcomes. Indeed, previous research has demonstrated the impact of the attractiveness and look of dominance of All correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Nurit Tal-Or, Department of Communication, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel. E-mail: ntalor@com.hevra. haifa.ac. il politicians’ faces on their chances of being elected (e.g., Olivola & Todorov, 2010). Research to date has generally focused on the main effect of various facial characteristics on electoral outcomes, yet, in this study, we argue that the political ideology of the candidates interacts with the maturity of their faces in influencing public opinion regarding the candidates’ ability and the public’s voting intentions. The Debate About the Antecedents of Public Opinion There has been a long-standing controversy among political scientists regarding the political competence of citizens. In the first decades of the twentieth century the public was regarded as relatively ignorant about political matters (Price, 1992), however, more optimistic views arose over time (Kuklinski & Quirk, 2000). According to one of these views, although the public lacks political knowledge, their opinion as a whole is rational because they cancel out each other’s errors (Page & Shapiro, 1992). Another approach claims that citizens base their opinions on cognitive shortcuts called heuristics that do not demand much political knowledge and lead to mostly reliable political opinions (Popkin, 1994; Sniderman, Brody & Tetlock, 1991). However, some challenge this last approach, claiming that these heuristics often lead to irrational and distorted opinions (Kuklinski & Quirk, 2000). Although these claims may be true, we must also consider that following Rosenberg and McCafferty (1987), many of the studies of the impact of heuristics on voting provided subjects with little or no context to rely on, thus possibly artificially augmenting their effects (e.g., Lev-On & Waismel-Manor, 2016). The current research demonstrates how citizens can combine rational and relevant information regarding the leaders’ political attitudes, together with heuristic and irrational factors about the politicians’ appearance, in forming their political opinions and decisions. By doing so, it provides a more realistic exploration of heuristics and voting. The Importance of Looks for Politicians Abundant research conducted mainly in recent years has documented the importance of politicians’ looks for their perception and electoral success (e.g., Brusattin, 2011). In a seminal study, Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, and Hall (2005) showed their participants pictures of real candidates for 1 s. They demonstrated that perceptions about their competence arising simply from this brief view of their faces significantly predicted election outcomes. Using a different methodology, Armstrong, Green, Jones, and Wright (2010) obtained similar results. I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L O F P U B L I C O P I N I O N R E S E A R C H 2