Facial similarity and vote attribution: how inferences from faces guide our judgement.

The scientific literature (Bailenson et al., 2006; 2008) reports that increased facial similarity between an elector and a candidate enhances vote intention towards that same candidate. Moreover, scientific evidence (Rule & Ambady, 2009; 2010) suggests that people can accurately guess the political orientation of both politicians and voters at a rate significantly higher than chance. Therefore, the current research aimed to determine whether other people use facial similarity between an elector and a candidate to infer a person’s vote intention even in the absence of ideological cues. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that the gender of the observers, the electors, and the candidates would significantly mediate the effects of facial similarity. To test the hypotheses, an experimental study was designed, which included a questionnaire consisting of 6 triplets of artificially generated faces, all of the same gender. For each triplet, the participants, a sample of N = 566 (76% women), were asked to indicate the likelihood that the person portrayed in the central photograph, described as an elector, had voted for one of two candidates, whose pictures were displayed at the bottom of the screen. Following the probability attribution task, participants were also asked to report the criteria they used while making these attributions. The main hypothesis found support in the data, revealing a small yet significant impact of the resemblance between the elector and a candidate on the participants' vote attributions. An effect of the triplet’s gender was also detected: while the effect of similarity in female triplets did not emerge, it was significant in male triplets. Furthermore, an effect of the participant’s gender was also supported by the data, with male participants likely exhibiting the own-gender recognition bias (Herlits & Lovén, 2013), as the effect of similarity on vote attribution intensified when male participants evaluated male triplets. Overall, the findings integrate previous literature on the topic and deepen our understanding of the role played by facial similarity in political inferences.