Do voters take politicians at 'face' value?

— -- Candidates campaign on the issues, but new research shows some people are swayed by looks alone.

Although rendering a snap judgment on a candidate's competence with just a quick glance may seem a superficial way to judge people, a Princeton University study finds that such reasoning accurately predicted election outcomes in about 70% of gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races last year.

First impressions affect real-world outcomes, and those who base judgments on those impressions often do so unconsciously, says study co-author Alexander Todorov, an assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton.

He says candidates should be "judged by their deeds as opposed to their appearance, but people do make these snap judgments."

The research, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was based on experiments involving about 300 people who didn't know anything about the candidates whose photos they were shown. Participants had a split-second look at the images and were asked to render a "gut feeling" about who was more competent. The new study supports research Todorov published two years ago in the journal Science.

If participants recognized any faces, that data were removed to ensure that the decisions were based on facial appearance alone. The study looked only at races in which the candidates matched in gender and ethnicity. Because there weren't enough races involving minority candidates and women to make any statistical conclusions, Todorov says the study included only white males.

After the elections, the researchers compared the competency judgments and election outcomes and found that participants selected winners in 72.4% of senatorial races and 68.6% of gubernatorial contests.

Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, says people make such judgments in their personal lives but are less likely to do so in voting unless they don't have much information.