Caltech-led researchers find negative cues from appearance alone matter for real...(ith literature showing that humans prior...)

Date:10/29/2008

ith literature showing that humans prioritize negative information about outgroups"--groups of individuals who are perceived to not belong to one's own group, as defined by characteristics such as profession, age, gender, social community, and shared values, but to an outside group. "A voter who knows nothing about a candidate will likely put that candidate into a default outgroup position. From there, negative attributions are expected to get the primary weight in decisionmaking. And that is precisely what we see," he says.

"Earlier behavioral studies showed that rapid, effortless inferences from facial appearance predict the outcomes of political elections," says study coauthor Alex Todorov, an assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. In 2005, Todorov published the first study to show that voter decisions are significantly associated with character-trait judgments that are based entirely on the visual appearance of political candidates.

"However," Todorov adds, "these studies did not show how these inferential processes could play out at the level of individual voters. Two types of evidence will be critical to delineate the causal effects of appearance on electoral success: work by political scientists studying real voting decisions and work by cognitive neuroscientists studying the proximal mechanisms of the effects of inferences on decisions. The fMRI studies are an important step in the latter direction."

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Contact: Lori Oliwenstein lorio@caltech.edu 626-395-3631 California Institute of Technology Source:Eurekalert

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