Recent research has documented that competent-looking political candidates do better in U.S. elections and that babyfaced individuals are generally perceived to be less competent than maturefaced individuals. Taken together, this suggests that babyfaced political candidates are perceived as less competent and therefore fare worse in elections. We test this hypothesis, making use of photograph-based judgments by 2,772 respondents of the facial appearance of 1,785 Finnish political candidates. Our results confirm that babyfacedness is negatively related to inferred competence in politics. Despite this, babyfacedness is either unrelated or positively related to electoral success, depending on the sample of candidates.
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Paper provided by Research Institute of Industrial Economics in its series Working Paper Series with number
803.
Length: 16 pages Date of creation: 26 Jun 2009 Date of revision: Publication status: Published in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2009, pages 1132-1135. Handle: RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:0803
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