IF YOU think that elections are becoming more about a politician’s image and less about policies, this will worry you: candidates who simply look more competent than their opponent are far more likely to win, according to a study of US congressional elections.
Alexander Todorov of Princeton University and his colleagues looked at how candidates’ faces can influence an election. They showed more than 800 people pairs of photographs of similar-looking candidates who had competed against each other in elections for the US senate or house of representatives. After seeing each face for less than a second, the participants were…
