Let’s face it, looks matter. Whether it’s the beautiful job applicant or the handsome local server at your favorite hangout, attractive people certainly have an advantage. They are perceived as having better personalities and tend to make more money.
I’m old enough to remember the stir that was created when Julia Roberts married Lyle Lovett or when Howard Stern married Beth Ostrosky. People were bemused and wondered why an attractive person would marry someone who was viewed by many others as unattractive.
Julia and Beth did not marry someone on the same physical attractiveness scale and it blew our minds!
Okay, (yawn) tell me something I didn’t know. I mean, didn’t we all learn the lesson that “things aren’t fair” in life? Yes, but what has me fraught with concern is a study about how we often choose our leaders.
Of course looks matter but when it comes to selecting our leaders, I had assumed we wouldn’t be so shallow. That’s why this throwback study stopped me in my tracks. It was like having a stick shoved into the spokes of my bike while on a lovely afternoon ride.
Warning, you might want to sit down.
This study is titled, “Facial appearance affects voting decision”.
“Our results are a further demonstration that, even for decisions ostensibly based on objective and critical evaluation of a variety of information, we may in fact be influenced by relatively simple unconscious stereotypical processes.”
So what did the researchers actually do?
They took pictures of candidates and manipulated the images to transform them into unrecognizable photos. The goal was to retain the integrity of the candidate’s picture by maintaining “the shape and configuration of features” while making them unrecognizable to the general population. The study was designed to look at both facial features (Study 1) and the attributions of attractiveness, dominance, and personality (study 2)
The fact that nonverbals could possibly impact a leadership decision, however small that influence may be, is what keeps me up at night.
“We acknowledge that voting decisions are dependent on many other factors than just the candidates’ faces, not least of which must be the candidates’ policies. It has, however, been suggested that voters may often use a simplifying cognitive strategy to code the large amount of data available to them about politicians and their personalities, as well as their policies (Caprara, Barbaranelli, & Zimbardo, 1997)”
Your co-pilot (who’s still tossing and turning),
