Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access originally published online on October 28, 2008
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2008 3(4):344-352; doi:10.1093/scan/nsn040
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A neural basis for the effect of candidate appearance on election outcomes
1Scripps College, 1030 Columbia Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711, 2California Institute of Technology, M/C 228-77, Pasadena, CA 91101, 3Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, 4Department of Political Science, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52240, 5Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA and 6Korea University, Psychology, Seoul, Korea 136-701
Election outcomes correlate with judgments based on a candidate's visual appearance, suggesting that the attributions viewers make based on appearance, so-called thin-slice judgments, influence voting. Yet, it is not known whether the effect of appearance on voting is more strongly influenced by positive or negative attributions, nor which neural mechanisms subserve this effect. We conducted two independent brain imaging studies to address this question. In Study 1, images of losing candidates elicited greater activation in the insula and ventral anterior cingulate than images of winning candidates. Winning candidates elicited no differential activation at all. This suggests that negative attributions from appearance exert greater influence on voting than do positive. We further tested this hypothesis in Study 2 by asking a separate group of participants to judge which unfamiliar candidate in a pair looked more attractive, competent, deceitful and threatening. When negative attribution processing was enhanced (specifically, under judgment of threat), images of losing candidates again elicited greater activation in the insula and ventral anterior cingulate. Together, these findings support the view that negative attributions play a critical role in mediating the effects of appearance on voter decisions, an effect that may be of special importance when other information is absent.
Keywords: social cognition; faces; trait judgment; voting; political science
Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Michael L. Spezio, Scripps College, 120 Steele Hall, 1030 Columbia Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711, USA. E-mail: mspezio{at}scrippscollege.edu.
*These authors contributed equally to this work.
The authors declare that they have no competing financial interests.
Received October 6, 2008. Accepted October 17, 2008.