Superfacial Voters

No, “superfacial” is not a typo (though it is not, or at least until now has not been, a word).

According to a report in this morning’s Wired Campus, a blog from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeremy N. Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University (would that be virtual humans or virtual interaction?) and his students

conducted some experiments using virtual reality and concluded that voters who don’t feel a strong connection to either political party are more likely to vote for the politician whose face resembles their own.

In 2004, one week before the presidential election, Mr. Bailenson and his students questioned a random sample of people about their views on President Bush and his then Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, while viewing photographs of the candidates. One third of the people viewed a photograph of President Bush whose face was inconspicuously altered to mirror their own appearance. Another third viewed Senator Kerry’s face, morphed into their own. A control group saw unaltered photographs of the two men.

The researchers found that people’s preference for a candidate who [sic] facial profile mirrors their own is strong enough to affect the outcome of an election.

Americans have often been accused of narcissism before (such as here, brilliantly), but nothing like this.

There is one potentially interesting unintended implication of Bailenson et. al.’s research. Consider:

Similarity between two people instills altruism and trust. Biological explanations for this effect argue that phenotype matching (implicit recognition of subtle physical cues) is a mechanism organisms use to identify genetically-related kin. Indeed, different areas of the brain process facial images morphed with the self than images morphed with familiar others. Social explanations argue that people use physical similarity as a proxy for compatible interests and values. [Citations omitted]

If this research is true, perhaps biology partially explains the recent findings of Robert Putnam, discussed here, “that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone — from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.”

That research might also throw some new light on another study, discussed here and here, by Professors Stanley Rothman, director of the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change and a professor of government at Smith College; Seymour Martin Lipset, a professor of public policy at George Mason University; and Neil Nevitte, a political-science professor at the University of Toronto, who found “a negative correlation between the degree of racial diversity and the perceived quality of the educational experience.” [Quoted from second “here” cited above]

Of course one need not believe that “biology is destiny” in order to have serious reservations about the piously extravagant beatitudes about the blessings of “diversity” that have the status of the Revealed Word in academia and the elite regions of the real world these days.