Can People Detect Ideological Stance from Facial Photographs? Seems not.

Can People Detect Ideological Stance from Facial Photographs? Tamsin K. Saxton, Sophie L. Hart,Lucy V. Desai, Thomas V. Pollet. Human Ethology, Volume 34, 17-25, April 17, 2019. https://doi.org/10.22330/he/34/017-025

ABSTRACT: Nonverbal cues are instrumental in animal social interactions, and humans place especial value on facial appearance and displays to predict and interpret others’ behaviours. Several studies have reported that people can judge someone’s political orientation (e.g. Republican vs Democrat) based on facial appearance at greater-than-chance accuracy. This begs the question of the granularity of such judgements. Here, we investigate whether people can judge one aspect of political orientation (attitudes to immigration) based on the facial photographs that politicians use to represent themselves on the European Parliament website. We find no evidence of such ability, and no evidence for an interaction between the judges’ own attitudes to immigration and their accuracy. Many studies report facial manifestations of attitudinal and behavioural proclivities, and yet we should not lose sight of the fact that facial appearance may be a relatively impoverished cue relative to other potential sources of information.

Keywords: Appearance, face judgements, thin slices.

Even so, it was not so a far-fetched idea... Check People Can Accurately (But Not Adaptively) Judge Strangers’ Antigay Prejudice from Faces. Ravin Alaei, Nicholas O. Rule. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, Apr 5 2019. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2019/04/people-can-accurately-but-not.html