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Baby face wins hearts, no vote: study
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-06-13 08:47
A baby face may win hearts but it doesn' win votes, U.S. researchers said
Thursday.
Students picked the winning U.S. congressional candidate nearly 70 percent of
the time merely by glancing at their photos and deciding which one looked more
competent, they said.
"his remarkable effect ... likely reflects differences in 'babyfacedness,'"
Leslie Zebrowitz of Brandeis University and Joann Montepare of Emerson College,
both in Massachusetts, wrote in a commentary.
For their study, Alexander Todorov and colleagues at Princeton University
showed pairs of photographs of real candidates for Congress, winners and losers,
to more than 800 students.
They asked them to choose the candidate they thought had won or would win,
and asked them why. On average, the volunteers looked at each pair of photos for
one second.
The students chose correctly 68.8 percent of the time, Todorov and colleagues
report in this week's issue of the journal Science.
The students correctly chose the winner based on how competent he or she
looked in 71.6 percent of the Senate races and in 66.8 percent of the House of
Representatives races.
Zebrowitz, who wrote a book entitled "Reading Faces: Window to the Soul," and
Montepare said it boiled down to having a baby face.
"A more babyfaced individual is perceived as less competent than a more
mature-faced, but equally attractive, peer of the same age and sex," they wrote.
"Although we like to believe that we 'don't judge a book by its cover,'
superficial appearance qualities such as babyfacedness profoundly affect human
behavior in the blink of an eye," Zebrowitz said.
She said different cultures generally agreed on what gives a person a baby
face — a round face, large eyes, small nose, high forehead and small chin.
"As Darwin recollected in his autobiography, he was almost denied the chance
to take the historic Beagle voyage — the one that enabled the main observations
of his theory of evolution — on account of his nose," the researchers concluded.
"Apparently, the captain did not believe that a person with such a nose would
'possess sufficient energy and determination.'"
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