Hey, good lookin’. Whatcha got cookin’? A vote for a conservative, perhaps?
It seems that, among its many uses and annoyances, artificial intelligence has now learned how to predict our political ideologies, and it does this by examining our facial expressions, our “beauty” (to quote from the study I’m about to explain) and other visuals it can analyze.
I have always been partial to the definition of attractiveness provided by early 20th century Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran, who said, “Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”
That shows what I know. That feel-good philosophy is apparently completely unscientific. Heart schmart.
The study, newly published in Scientific Reports, which is owned by Nature, says a simple mug shot can allow a computer to predict a person’s political leanings to a success rate of 61%. Researchers used the campaign photos and ideological data available for 3,233 candidates for local office in Denmark. Then they used techniques, such as “convolutional neural networks, heat maps, analyses of facial expressions, and assessments of physical characteristics such as masculinity and beauty” to analyze the subjects.
They tried to “identify specific features of the face that connect to the model’s predictions for political ideology.”
I know physical beauty is a tricky subject, informed by (often harmful) cultural references that range from Barbie dolls to movie stars to TikTok videos. Usually, diplomacy is the watchword when treading these waters. But the researchers are blunt. Referring to a growing body of evidence, they write that “politicians on the right have been found to be more attractive than those on the left.”
It’s not just the women, either. “Higher right-wing attractiveness scores were also observed among young (male) adults in the general population, though not among pundits.”
That last bit may be enough to discredit the whole field of study; although, for the record, I consider myself just right of center. And I’m a columnist, not a pundit.
In the study at hand, researchers used Face API from Microsoft Azure’s Cognitive Services to study photos of the Danish candidates. The computer predicted beauty based on how 60 people had rated the faces of 5,500 people using a beauty score of 0-4.
The upshot? “For females (though not males), high attractiveness scores were found among those the model identified as likely to be conservative.”
And, to confirm what all our mothers taught us, looks aren’t everything. “We also found that expressing happiness is associated with conservatism for both genders.”
So, as if we didn’t have enough for liberals and conservatives to fight about, we now have this.
To be completely fair, the website hottestheadsofstate.com (I wish I was making this up) rated all U.S. presidents from best looking to ugliest. Among modern presidents, the highest rank went to John F. Kennedy, a liberal, who scored third place overall, and Barack Obama, also a liberal, who came in sixth (although conservative George W. Bush was a respectable eighth).
Franklin Pierce finished first, probably due to the skill of his 19th century portrait artist. Presidents, it must be noted, rarely are elected at the peak of their physical attractiveness. A comparison of photos from their 20s might elicit different results.
Also, getting back to the study at hand, an analysis of candidate photos may not have much application to the population at large. As the study notes, candidates have an incentive to smile and look happy, because it might attract voters. That still wouldn’t explain why the conservative ones looked happier.
But if you’re a liberal looking for a bright side to all this (something to elicit a rare smile, perhaps?), a 2014 study in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes found that people who think they are attractive tend to be less sympathetic to social inequalities. Ergo, they become conservatives.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in the current study is that it used only caucasian faces, providing a limited sample of humans overall.
Still, this isn’t the first study to draw such conclusions. A 2017 paper in the Journal of Public Economics was headlined, “Conservative politicians look better and voters reward it.”
And, beyond politics, plenty of research exists to support the notion that good-looking people get the best jobs, earn the most promotions and take home more money than the rest of us.
You can argue this isn’t fair.
However, a better argument would be that it’s irrelevant to political ideology. The researchers said a big reason for this study was to uncover things that could better help protect sensitive information, and to better understand what a face can unintentionally communicate to a computer using AI.
But, silly me, nothing is truly irrelevant to politics in the 21st century, except maybe that elusive “light in the heart.”