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Iulian Boldea (Editor) - Literature, Discourses and the Power of Multicultural Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2017. eISBN: 978-606-8624-12-9
255 Section: Social Sciences
THE POLITICIAN’S IMAGE – SEEN THROUGH VOTERS FIRST IMPRESSIONS AND
EVALUATIONS. A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH
Lorina Culic Research Assist., ”Babeș-Bolyai” University of Cluj-Napoca
Abstract: People tend to form spontaneously impressions of personality about others, and these impressions, even though they are based on minimal information, are surprisingly accurate. In the
political context, these first-impressions play a crucial role, especially when voters employ them in
predicting who the winner will be, as some experimental studies have shown (Todorov, Mandisodza;
Ballew & Todorov, 2007; Olivola & Todorov, 2010). In the present article we discuss about the first-impressions evaluations that voters make, and their opinions on the role of politician‟s image as
expressed in an online survey (N=387).
Keywords: first-impression, appearance inferences, voting, candidate image, voter behavior
Introduction
From John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon‘s 1960 first televised presidential debate
in American history, where the role of the candidate‘s image has proven to be vital in winning
the election, to the subtle or less subtle changes that are being made today by political
marketing in processing politicians‘ image, which that later is distributed directly or on social
media, the candidates‘ image plays an important role in influencing voters impressions on
how a good politicians should look like.
A recent theme that has captured the attention of social psychologists, cognitivists,
political scientists, and those studying voting behavior and decision-making is the one that
states that evaluations based on first impressions on the image of political candidates
represent a real predictor for those who will win elections. Thus, starting with the first
impressions on the personality attributes of politicians, voters are able to make evaluations
that correlate with actual electoral results, even in the case of strict control of other
explanatory variables.
In this context, we follow this interdisciplinary approach set by other authors, in which
we want to test if voters rely on first impressions and evaluations of candidates‘ appearance,
and if evaluation on personality traits, respectively on the competence, attractiveness and
trustfulness traits are used by voters.
Literature review
First-impressions are defined as the initial perception and formation of thoughts about
another. The formation of first impressions is a constant, unstoppable process, a mechanism
that sorts the surrounding world and applies labels to make decisions as quickly as possible.
Hall and Andrezejewski note that first impressions provide a sense of order and predictability
in social interactions, when we tend to generalize contexts, and connect behaviors and
appearances (Hall and Andrezejewski in Ambady &Skowronski, 2008, 87). In this context,
people are able to make inferences about new people with little information to go on. As Mark
Schaller (in Ambady &Skowronski, 2008, 17) points out, people are adaptively predisposed to
form immediate impressions of others, and this happens through a process of minimal
cognitive effort and is a repeated practice.
Iulian Boldea (Editor) - Literature, Discourses and the Power of Multicultural Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2017. eISBN: 978-606-8624-12-9
256 Section: Social Sciences
Rule (in Ambady &Skowronski, 2008, 35), notes that perception can occur through all
five senses, but usually takes place through vision and/or hearing. Therefore, the face proves
to be very important in forming first-impressions. But also, perception of others‘ voices offers
information about one‘s identity, emotion, intent and thought (Rule in Ambady &Skowronski,
2008, 41).
The study of first impressions accuracy is a well-developed one, in capturing whether
some people have correct or incorrect conclusions about strangers. To what extent these
impressions are valid? Some authors tried to test first impression accuracy on personality
judgments: on the big five personality traits, extraversion and conscientiousness seem to be
the most easily predicted (McCrae &Costa, 1987 in Ambady &Skowronski, 2008, 108), and
are better predicted in naturalistic interactions (Gray and Ambady, 2006). In an interesting
experiment, in which perceivers had no opportunity to interact with the target of their
judgment, Albright, Kenny and Malloy (1988) found out that people rely primarily on
physical appearance and can determine personality factors like extraversion and
conscientiousness only from photos, in zero acquaintance contexts (Kenny & West, Ambady
&Skowronski, 2008, 130).
One of the most prominent authors that has written on the role of first impressions in
voters‘ behavior and political decisions is Alexander Todorov, a psychology professor at
Princeton University. It is argued that even though millions of dollars are spent on campaigns
to disseminate information about candidates and to convince citizens to vote for these
candidates, these spendings prove to be unnecessary if people can judge and predict electoral
outcomes starting from the evaluation of candidates' appearance (Todorov & all, 2005,1623).
Todorov‘s hypothesis argued that inferences of competence from facial appearance could
influence voting decisions of electors (2005, 1624). In order to test this, voters evaluated
images of candidates for the U.S. Senate from 2000, 2002 and 2004 and from House from
2002 and 2004. Todorov points out that after 1-second exposure to faces of the candidates,
voters can predict the outcomes of U.S. congressional elections based solely on facial
appearance. There are more studies that analyze the link between real world election results
with reflexive first-impressions judgments. In the studies of Todorov (et al.2005), Antoniakis
and Daglas (2009), Berggren (2010), participants in the laboratory judged headshots of
unfamiliar candidates as to predict the real election winners, through an exposure from 1
second to no more than 33 milliseconds. It is proven that such judgments appear to predict
election winners with a high degree of accuracy.
Another interesting relation that was studied connects first impressions to
attractiveness of the source, which documents the positive treatment received by attractive
individuals. A meta-study (Langlois et al, 2000) lists the advantages of beautiful people: they
are more persuasive, treated better, with a higher success in jobs, beauty being a signal for a
good health and a higher intelligence. As Lau and Redlaswk point (2001), beauty represents
also an information heuristic, which voters employ in face of political choice. Also,
perceptions of physical attractiveness have been shown to increase electoral success cross-
nationally (Rosar et al., 2008; Lutz, 2010). Berggren et al. (2010) find that attractiveness
explains electoral success better than personality evaluations such as competence,
intelligence, likability, or trustworthiness. Berggren et al. (2010) study the role of beauty in
politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns, through an
analysis of 1,929 Finnish political candidates from 10,011 respondents. The extensive
analysis was developed by using four national and international web surveys. They discovered
that an increase in beauty by one standard deviation is associated with a 17- to 20-percent
increase in the number of votes for the average non-incumbent. Beauty is more strongly
correlated with success than either perceived competence or trustworthiness and that beauty
matters more for female candidates (Berggren, Jordahl, Poutvaara, 2010, 2).
Iulian Boldea (Editor) - Literature, Discourses and the Power of Multicultural Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2017. eISBN: 978-606-8624-12-9
257 Section: Social Sciences
Nonetheless, other authors state that perceptions of competence or leadership traits,
arguably constitute a more informed basis for political decision-making than attractiveness, as
the former relate to the candidate‘s ability to perform better in job. In an attempt to see how
people use first-impressions, Todorov (2005) asked people to make judgments on seven
different trait dimensions: competence, intelligence, leadership, honesty, trustworthiness,
charisma, and likability. Through factor analysis he showed that these judgment clustered on
three dimensions: competence (competence, intelligence, leadership), trust (honesty,
trustworthiness), and likability (charisma, likability). The most important conclusion is that
only the judgments on competence predicted the outcomes of the elections (2005, 1624),
compared to trust and likability. These findings show that people make highly differentiated
trait inferences from facial appearance and that these inferences have selective effects on
decisions. Also, Atkinson et al. (2009) found that for US Senate candidates running in more
competitive districts, a ―more competent‖ candidate face increases support among
independent voters (Mattes and Milazzo, 2013, 9).
In the context of the strong role that the first impressions have on the formation of
political assessments and decisions, especially in studying the voting behavior, the Rational
Choice Theory that states that the voter is informed and calculated in casting his vote, this
theory loses ground in the face of political reality. Following the arguments of Downs and
Wattenberg, if voters are rather uninformed about political candidates and their programs, and
if the political entertainment promotes the image of candidates, voters will focus more on
personal characteristics of candidates and thereof on their image (Downs, 1957; Wattenberg,
1991). Heuristics, information shortcuts, stereotyping and thin slices of information are used
by voters that are not familiar with detailed policies.
Methodology and results
In order to find out what are the voter‘s impressions about the appearance of
candidates‘, we applied an online survey on students from Cluj-Napoca universities during
2016-2017. Most of the cited studies (Todorov, Mandisodza; Ballew & Todorov, 2007;
Olivola & Todorov, 2010) have used an experimental design on students from various
universities. Even though, we recognize the attractiveness of an experimental study on the
first impressions of voters, the present study proposes to find out general opinions about what
the image of politicians conveys.
We have used quota sampling on a population of 387 students, with a confidence level
of 95, where the average age is 21 years, 82% of the respondents come from the urban
environment, 75% were women and the rest of 25% respondents were men. The majority of
respondents are students that are specialized in social sciences (63%), followed by
specializations in languages and literature (14%), technical specialization (13%) and in law
(5%). There is an even distribution between first, second and third year students.
Graphic 1 – Year of study
Graphic 2 – Faculties
Iulian Boldea (Editor) - Literature, Discourses and the Power of Multicultural Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2017. eISBN: 978-606-8624-12-9
258 Section: Social Sciences
Asked how they are positioned on the political axis, most respondents see themselves
as having a center-right ideology (47%), or center ideology (34%). Because we had young
respondents at the survey, the majority of them declared they did not have the right to vote at
last elections (41%), but also some of them did not vote (18%), as trends on youth
participation emphasize.
Graphic 3- Identification on political axis Graphic 4- Last vote
Respondents participated more at presidential elections (34%) and local elections (31%) than
at parliamentary elections or European Parliament elections. At the same time, respondents do
not seem to be close to any party at the moment (39%), describing maybe the general
disappointment and lack of trust in politics. We can also see a change in political preferences:
if at the last elections, respondents voted with the Liberal Party, now they are heading towards
USR – Save Romania Union, a center-progressive party.
Graphic 5- What party would you vote for at next elections?
After the profile of the respondents was outlined, they were asked to rank their opinions on
the elements that matter most to a political candidate: its appearance, its competencies or the
level of trust emitted. Declarative, respondents consider that the most important element for
voting a politician is represented by the politician‘s competence (90%), followed by the
degree of confidence that the politician exudes (86%), and the politician‘s image matters last
(52%).
Iulian Boldea (Editor) - Literature, Discourses and the Power of Multicultural Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2017. eISBN: 978-606-8624-12-9
259 Section: Social Sciences
Graphic 6
These results are easily countered by the results of Todorov and Mattes, Kyle and Milazzo
(2005; 2010), which show that at the subconscious level, first impressions of the degree of
attractiveness or competence of the politicians‘ influences the voters‘ future decisions. The
next step focused on respondents' views on the socio-demographic characteristic of the
politician that can be inferred from its appearance and the personality traits the politician
holds. We used a 5 points Likert scale to evaluate these opinions, but we grouped the answers
on a shorter Likert scale, to emphasize the differences of opinions.
Graphic 7- Traits derived from candidate‘s image
Iulian Boldea (Editor) - Literature, Discourses and the Power of Multicultural Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2017. eISBN: 978-606-8624-12-9
260 Section: Social Sciences
Graphic 8- Traits derived from candidate‘s image
Respondents believe that from a picture and from the appearance of politicians you
can not deduce information about: their religion (73% disagree), their sexual orientation (39%
disagree), their marital status (61%), political ideology (56%), profession (49%), personality
traits (35%), ethnicity (34%), social status (24%). Our findings seem to be in contradiction
with those studies that show that using first-impressions, respondents can determine the
ideology of the candidate, just starting from their picture. On the other hand, respondents
strongly agree that politicians‘ pictures can transmit information about their age (71%), their
race (61%), their social status (43%), ethnicity (39%), and to an extent, their personality traits
(31%). We observe a strong disposition from respondents to offer median answers.
After this, we continued to deepen the views of the respondents on what the
politicians‘ appearance transmits, and tested their opinions on a number of personality factors,
including the Big Five personality traits. We grouped respondents‘ answers in three
articulated opinions. It is considered that the image of a politician can form and offer first-
impressions about the self-confidence of the politician (59%), his/hers sociability degree
(36%), his/hers temper (33%), character and empathy level (26%). However, the appearance
of the politician does not convey information about his/hers level of correctness (58%),
professional competences and morals (56%), honesty (54%) and creativity (53%). The
negative evaluations on what types of information first-impressions transmit are predominant.
Iulian Boldea (Editor) - Literature, Discourses and the Power of Multicultural Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2017. eISBN: 978-606-8624-12-9
261 Section: Social Sciences
Graphic 9 – Personality traits derived from candidate‘s image
On the Big Five Personality Traits, respondents believe that the appearance of a
politician transmits information about his personality on the extraversion trait – how outgoing
and sociable a person is (42%), agreeableness trait – kind, warm and considerate (37%), but
not on the neuroticism trait, conscientiousness and openness to experiences, conclusions in
line with those that affirm that the agreeableness trait is the most easily identified (McCrae
&Costa, 1987 in Ambady &Skowronski, 2008, 108).
Graphic 10- Big Five Personality Traits
Finally, asked about the most important elements of a candidate‘s image, respondents valued
the most the non-verbal cues like gestures (21%) and body posture (20%), followed by the
Iulian Boldea (Editor) - Literature, Discourses and the Power of Multicultural Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2017. eISBN: 978-606-8624-12-9
262 Section: Social Sciences
resonance of the politicians‘ voice (17%), his clothing/style (16%), and last the importance of
facial appearance and attractiveness (15%).
Graphic 11- Elements of the candidate‘s image
Conclusions
People tend to form spontaneously impressions of personality about others, and these
impressions, even though they are based on minimal information, are surprisingly accurate.
Results from our online survey emphasize that young voters think that the candidate‘s image
transmits important information on traits like age (71%), their race (61%), their social status
(43%), ethnicity (39%), and to an extent, their personality traits (31%). First-impressions on
the candidate‘s appearance can inform the voters about one‘s self-confidence, the sociability
degree, one‘s temper and empathy level, but our respondents do not consider that politicians‘
appearances transmit information about their competence, how well their will do their job,
their skills and level of trust that we can have in that person. Obviously, our findings are in
contradiction with the experimental approach proposed by other authors (Todorov, 2005;
Mattes, Kyle & Milazzo, 2010; Berggren, Jordahl, Poutvaara, 2010), which show how first-
impressions work at a subconscious level rather than at a declarative level. Even if people
have biases in interpreting behaviors and contexts, people have a great ability to interpret
nonverbal cues like facial displays, gestures and infer states and personality traits from them,
information most relevant for parties and candidates and future campaigns.
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263 Section: Social Sciences
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