www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0008733
Email this article Open Access Research Article Democrats and Republicans Can Be Differentiated from Their Faces Individuals' faces communicate a great deal of information about them. Although some of this information tends to be perceptually obvious (such as race and sex), much of it is perceptually ambiguous, without clear or obvious visual cues. Here we found that individuals' political affiliations could be accurately discerned from their faces. In Study 1, perceivers were able to accurately distinguish whether US Senate candidates were either Democrats or Republicans based on photos of their faces. Study 2 showed that these effects extended to Democrat and Republican college students, based on their senior yearbook photos. Study 3 then showed that these judgments were related to differences in perceived traits among the Democrat and Republican faces. Republicans were perceived as more powerful than Democrats. Moreover, as individual targets were perceived to be more powerful, they were more likely to be perceived as Republicans by others. Similarly, as individual targets were perceived to be warmer, they were more likely to be perceived as Democrats. These data suggest that perceivers' beliefs about who is a Democrat and Republican may be based on perceptions of traits stereotypically associated with the two political parties and that, indeed, the guidance of these stereotypes may lead to categorizations of others' political affiliations at rates significantly more accurate than chance guessing.
Top Background Individuals' faces communicate a great deal of information about them. Although some of this information tends to be perceptually obvious (such as race and sex), much of it is perceptually ambiguous, without clear or obvious visual cues. Methodology/Principal Findings Here we found that individuals' political affiliations could be accurately discerned from their faces. In Study 1, perceivers were able to accurately distinguish whether US Senate candidates were either Democrats or Republicans based on photos of their faces. Study 2 showed that these effects extended to Democrat and Republican college students, based on their senior yearbook photos. Study 3 then showed that these judgments were related to differences in perceived traits among the Democrat and Republican faces. Republicans were perceived as more powerful than Democrats. Moreover, as individual targets were perceived to be more powerful, they were more likely to be perceived as Republicans by others. Similarly, as individual targets were perceived to be warmer, they were more likely to be perceived as Democrats. Conclusions/Significance These data suggest that perceivers' beliefs about who is a Democrat and Republican may be based on perceptions of traits stereotypically associated with the two political parties and that, indeed, the guidance of these stereotypes may lead to categorizations of others' political affiliations at rates significantly more accurate than chance guessing. Citation: Rule NO, Ambady N (2010) Democrats and Republicans Can Be Differentiated from Their Faces. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This study was funded by National Science Foundation grant BCS-0435547 to Nalini Ambady and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to Nicholas O Rule.
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
The rates of accuracy in perceiving sexual orientation are not as high as those for age, race, and sex, however. Rather, characteristics such as sexual orientation and religious group membership tend to be fairly ambiguous to perceivers.
Thus, even subtle differences in perceptual cues may lead to accurate perceptions. One particularly consequential judgment is political candidates' actual electoral success based on perceivers' nave judgments of personality traits from the candidates' faces.
Given the ability of perceivers to infer the electoral success of political candidates from their faces and the importance and consequentiality of accurately perceiving others' group memberships, more generally, we wondered whether perceivers would be able to accurately categorize individuals according to their political group membership. Political party affiliation is an important and salient identity for many individuals.
Considering the elective nature of choosing a political affiliation, we expected that political affiliation may represent an instance of a perceptually ambiguous category. If political affiliation was to be perceptible from facial appearance, we suspected that the rate of accuracy may be relatively low (albeit necessarily greater than chance guessing) and related to individuals' or communities' stereotypes about membership in a given political party--especially in the US, where the political community is largely dichotomously divided between Democrats and Republicans. To test these questions, we asked undergraduate participants to categorize as Democrats and Republicans the faces of professional politicians (Study 1) and their undergraduate peers (Study 2). We then related these categorizations to perceptions of traits from the targets' faces as a means of elucidating a possible mechanism for these effects (Study 3).
Top The current work was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Tufts University. Study 1 Can political affiliation be ascertained from an individual's face? To test this question, we asked participants to categorize the faces of professional politicians: the Democrat and Republican candidates from the 2004 and 2006 US Senate elections. Photos of the Democrat and Republican candidates from the 2004 and 2006 Senate elections were downloaded from the website of the Cable News Network (CNN;
com/ELECTION/) or from the candidates' campaign websites. Each photo was cropped to the extremes of the targets' heads (top of head, bottom of chin, sides of hair or ears), converted to grayscale, and standardized for size. To avoid race-based stereotypes, racial minority candidates were excluded from the study. In total, there were 118 candidates: 59 Democrats (n = 15 women) and 59 Republicans (n = 5 women). Twenty-nine undergraduate participants (n = 12 women) were instructed that they would be seeing a series of faces presented on a computer screen and that their task was to categorize each person as either a Democrat or Republican, using the "D" and "R" keys, respectively. Each image was presented in a random order and responses were collected using DirectRT software. After categorizing the 118 faces, participants were asked to volunteer their own political party membership (n = 23 Democrats, n = 6 Republicans) and to indicate whether they had recognized any of the targets that they categorized (n = 10 participants). Study 2 Study 1 examined whether career politicians' faces express information about their political affiliations. Study 2 extended this investigation to targets whose political group membership is less salient. We therefore asked perceivers to categorize the faces of college students belonging to Democrat and Republican clubs on campus from the senior portraits published in the targets' university yearbook. n = 9 women) undergraduates were digitally scanned from the senior yearbooks spanning years 2000-2008 of a private northeastern US university. All photos were of the targets' senior portraits and targets had indicated their membership in either the university's Democrat or Republican student group, which was recorded in the yearbook. The photos were prepared using the same image standardization procedures as in Study 1 All of the targets were Caucasian, similarly dressed, and homogeneous for educational background and age.
Twenty-four undergraduates (n = 14) at a different university categorized each face following the same procedures as in St...
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