Subliminal

Broadcasting, their research showed that among radio listeners, Nixon won by more than a two-to-one margin, but among the far greater number of television viewers, Kennedy beat him.

The Sindlinger study was never published in a scientific journal, and little niceties like sample size—and the methodology for accounting for demographic differences between radio and TV users—were not revealed. That’s how the issue stood for some forty years. Then, in 2003, a researcher enlisted 171 summer school students at the University of Minnesota to assess the debate, half after watching a video of it, half after listening to the audio only.²⁸ As scientific subjects, these students had an advantage over any group that might have been assembled at the time of the actual debate: they had no vested interest in either candidate and little or no knowledge of the issues. To the voters in 1960, the name Nikita Khrushchev carried great emotional significance. To these students, he sounded like just another hockey player. But their impression of the debate was no different from that of the voters four decades earlier: those students who watched the debate were significantly more likely to think Kennedy won than those who only listened to it.

IT’S LIKELY THAT, like the voters in the 1960 U.S. presidential election, we have all at some time chosen one individual over another based on looks. We vote for political candidates, but we also select from among candidates for spouse, friend, auto mechanic, attorney, doctor, dentist, vendor, employee, boss. How strong an influence does a person’s appearance have on us? I don’t mean beauty—I mean something more subtle, a look of intelligence, or sophistication, or competence. Voting is a good stand-in for probing the effect of appearance in many realms because there is not only plenty of data available but plenty of money to study it.

In one pair of experiments, a group of researchers in California created campaign flyers for several fictional congressional elections.²⁹ Each supposedly pitted a Republican against a Democrat. In reality, the “candidates” were models hired by the researchers to pose for the black-and-white photographs that would appear in the flyers. Half the models looked able and competent. The other half did not look very able. The researchers didn’t rely on their own judgment to determine that: they conducted a preliminary rating session in which volunteers rated each model’s visual appeal. Then, when the researchers made up the campaign flyers, in each case they pitted one of the more able-looking individuals against one of the less able-looking ones to see if the candidate with the better demeanor would get more votes.

In addition to each candidate’s (fake) name and picture, the flyers included substantive information such as party affiliation, education, occupation, political experience, and a three-line position statement on each of three campaign issues. To eliminate the effects of party preference, half the voters saw flyers in which the more able- looking candidate was a Republican, and half saw flyers in which he was a Democrat. In principle, it should have been only the substantive information that would be relevant to a voter’s choice.

The scientists recruited about two hundred volunteers to play the role of voters. The researchers told the volunteers that the campaign flyers were based on real information concerning real candidates. They also misled the volunteers about the purpose of the experiment, saying that they sought to examine how people vote when they have equal information—such as that on the flyers —on all of the candidates. The volunteers’ job, the scientists explained to them, was merely to look over the flyers and vote for the candidate of their choice in each of the elections presented. The “face effect” proved to be large: the candidate with the better demeanor, on average, won 59 percent of the vote. That’s a landslide in modern politics. In fact the only American president since the Great Depression to have won by that big a margin was Lyndon Johnson, when he beat Goldwater with 61 percent of the vote in 1964. And that was an election in which Goldwater was widely portrayed as a man itching to start a nuclear war.

In the second study, the researchers’ methodology was similar, except this time the pool of people whose photos were used to portray the candidates was chosen differently. In the first study, the candidates were all men who’d been judged by a voting committee as looking either more or less competent. In this study, the candidates were all women whose appearance had been assessed by a committee as being neutral. The scientists then employed a Hollywood-style makeup specialist and a photographer to create two photographic versions of each candidate: one in which she appeared more competent, and another in which she appeared less competent. In this mock election, a competent version of one woman was always pitted against an incompetent version of another. The result: on average, looking more like a leader equated to a vote swing of 15 percent at the polls. To get an idea of the magnitude of that effect, consider that in one recent California congressional election, a swing of that size would have changed the outcome in fifteen of the fifty-three districts.

I found these studies astounding and alarming. They imply that before anyone even discusses the issues, the race may be over, since looks alone can give a candidate a huge head start. With all the important issues of the day, it’s hard to accept that a person’s face would really sway our vote. One obvious criticism of this research is that these were mock elections. The studies might show that a competent appearance can give a candidate a boost, but they don’t address the issue of how “soft” that preference may be. Certainly one would expect that voters with strong ideological preferences would not be easily swayed by appearance. Swing voters ought to be more easily affected but is the phenomenon strong enough to affect elections in the real world?

In 2005, researchers at Princeton gathered black-and-white head shots of all the winners and runners-up in ninety-five races for the U.S. Senate and six hundred races for the House of Representatives from 2000, 2002, and 2004.³⁰ Then they assembled a group of volunteers to evaluate the candidates’ competence based on just a quick look at the photographs, discarding the data on any of the faces a volunteer recognized. The results were astonishing: the candidate the volunteers perceived as more competent had won in 72 percent of the Senate races and 67 percent of the House races, even higher success rates than in the California laboratory experiment. Then, in 2006, the scientists performed an experiment with even more astonishing—and, when you think about it, depressing—results. They conducted the face evaluations before the elections in question and predicted the winners based solely on the candidates’ appearance. They were strikingly accurate: the candidate voted as more competent-looking went on to win in 69 percent of the gubernatorial races and 72 percent of the Senate races.

I’ve gone into detail regarding these political studies not just because they are important in themselves but because, as I said earlier, they shed light on our broader social interactions. In high school, our vote for class president might be based on looks. It would be nice to think that we outgrow those primitive ways, but it’s not easy to graduate from our unconscious influences.

In his autobiography, Charles Darwin reported that he was almost denied the chance to make his historic voyage on the Beagle on account of his looks, in particular, because of his nose, which was large and somewhat bulbous.³¹ Darwin himself later used his nose, facetiously, as an argument against intelligent design, writing, “Will you honestly tell me … whether you believe that the shape of my nose was ordained and ‘guided by an intelligent cause’?”³² The Beagle’s captain wanted to keep Darwin off the ship because he had a personal belief that you could judge character by the shape of the nose, and a man with Darwin’s, he felt, could not possibly “possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.” In the end, of course, Darwin got the job. Of the captain, Darwin later wrote, “I think he was afterwards well-satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely.”³³

TOWARD THE END of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and company approach the great Wizard, offering him the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West. They can see only fire, smoke, and a floating image of the Wizard’s face as he responds in booming, authoritative tones that have Dorothy and her cohorts trembling with fear. Then Dorothy’s dog, Toto, tugs aside a curtain, revealing that the ominous Wizard is just an ordinary-looking man speaking into a microphone and pulling levers and twisting dials to orchestrate the fireworks. He yanks the curtain closed and admonishes, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” but the jig is up, and Dorothy discovers that the Wizard is just a genial old man.

There is a man or woman behind the curtain of everybody’s persona. Through our social relationships we get to know a small number of beings with the level of intimacy that allows us to peel back the curtain—our friends, close neighbors, family members, and perhaps the family dog (though certainly not the cat). But we don’t get to pull the curtain very far back on most of the people we meet, and it is usually drawn fully closed when we encounter someone for the first time. As a result, certain superficial qualities, such as voice, face and expression, posture, and the other nonverbal characteristics I’ve been talking about, mold many of the judgments we make about people— the nice or nasty people we work with, our neighbors, our doctors, our kids’ teachers, the politicians we vote for or against or simply try to ignore. Every day we meet people and form judgments like I trust that