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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.

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Page 1: SEEN THROUGH VOTERS FIRST IMPRESSIONS AND … 05 35.pdf · media, the candidates¶ image plays an important role in influencing voters impressions on how a good politicians should

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.

Page 2: SEEN THROUGH VOTERS FIRST IMPRESSIONS AND … 05 35.pdf · media, the candidates¶ image plays an important role in influencing voters impressions on how a good politicians should

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).

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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

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

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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

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%).

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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

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

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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

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.

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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

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

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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

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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Iulian Boldea (Editor) - Literature, Discourses and the Power of Multicultural Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2017. eISBN: 978-606-8624-12-9

263 Section: Social Sciences

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