Brain-imaging studies have revealed that how US citizens will vote next week could be based more on how the brain responds to negative aspects of a politician’s appearance rather than to positive ones.

The functional magnetic resonance imaging study is published online in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

The researchers at Caltech, Scripps College, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa, say this bias emerges particularly when voters have little or no information about a politician aside from their physical appearance.

Deciding who to trust, who to fear, and indeed who to vote for in an election depends, in part, on quick, implicit judgments about people’s faces. Now, Michael Spezio at Scripps and colleagues examined brain activation in subjects looking at the faces of real politicians.

The researchers conducted two independent studies using different groups of volunteers viewing the images of different politicians. Volunteers were shown pairs of photos, each with a politician coupled with their opponent in a real election in 2002, 2004, or 2006. Importantly, none of the study subjects were familiar with the politicians whose images they viewed.

In some experiments, the volunteers had to make character-trait judgments about the politicians – for example, which of the two politicians in the pair looked more competent to hold congressional office, or which looked more likely to physically threaten the volunteer. In other experiments, volunteers were asked to cast their vote for one politician in the pair; once again, their decisions were based only on the politicians’ appearances.

How this research applies to the imminent US elections would seem to be irrelevant given that there can be no one in the US who is not familiar with the faces of Barack Obama or John McCain. When you vote, just make sure you follow your conscience…

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