

Office of the White House, HarperCollins

Those unflattering pictures of the opposing candidate, used in attack ads blanketing American media this month, are not merely manipulative.

Political partisans really do believe their leaders are better looking, a study from Cornell; the State University of New York, Binghamton; and the University of Minnesota demonstrates.

“We showed pictures of familiar and unfamiliar political leaders to voters in two different samples and found that familiarity and partisanship each significantly influenced how candidates were perceived,” says Cornell’s Kevin M. Kniffin. “For example, Democrats rated Barack Obama as more physically attractive, and Republicans tended to rate Sarah Palin as better-looking.”

In both of the studies, people were viewing the pictures “through partisan-colored lenses,” explains Kniffin, a postdoctoral research associate in Cornell’s Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.

Two-faced politicians

Politico pix used in the “Attractiveness of Leaders” study were especially flattering, in part, because the subjects had approved the images at one time or another (President Obama’s portrait came from the White House website and Palin’s adorned the cover of her 2009 book, “Going Rogue”), whereas negative attack ads cunningly feature unflattering pictures of the opposing candidate.

According to Cornell’s Kevin Kniffin, dissing a rival’s looks has plenty of historic precedent: “Abe Lincoln, for example, is ugly by most standards if you look at his photo up close. But because we’ve all grown up understanding Lincoln was a great president – we are all supporters or followers, in terms of the research – it’s almost sacrilegious to point out that his face was asymmetrical.

When the gaunt and gangly Lincoln was a candidate, Kniffin notes, “Opponents ridiculed his appearance. In fact, Lincoln is reported to have made the self-deprecatory joke: ‘If I were two-faced, do you think I’d be wearing this one?’”

The researchers effectively removed the partisan-colored lenses by asking study participants to view unlabeled pictures of unfamiliar political leaders from distant states. Hardly anyone thought unknown politicians, who turned out to be affiliated with their party, were more attractive than any others.

“There’s no ‘Republican look’ or ‘Democrat hairdo,’” Kniffin says. “If you don’t recognize political leaders and can’t view them through partisan lenses, they don’t have the halos or horns that influence perceptions of familiar leaders.”

Published in the October Leadership Quarterly (as “Beauty is in the in-group of the beholded: Intergroup differences in the perceived attractiveness of leaders”) the researchers polled two populations: registered voters on the campus of a Midwestern state university (in Minnesota) and paid staffers for state legislators (in Wisconsin) with more profound partisan inclinations.

Those legislative aides might be interested in one observation from the report, concerning the dynamics of office romances. Subordinates tend to show enhanced perceptions, the researchers wrote, “for organizational leaders whom they might not consider physically attractive.”

Moving from state capitals to Capitol Hill – and recalling scandalous dalliances between comely young interns and gnarly old congressmen (“How could she? Yuck!”) – those partisan-colored lenses unwittingly worn by followers explain a lot, Kniffin says: “Warts and wrinkles disappear. Magically, your leader is not so bad-looking.”

Physically attractive, even.

Other authors of the Leadership Quarterly article were Vladas Griskevicius, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota; Brian Wansink, Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University; and David Sloan Wilson, SUNY Binghamton. Funding for the study was provided by Cornell.