RESEARCH NOTE Predicting Elections from Politicians ’ Faces

People are quick to infer the character of others from their faces. Plato believed that this tendency would cause people to elect inferior leaders (Plato, 1901). Modern research has found that the predisposition to make snap judgments affects hiring decisions (Meehl, 1965). Moreover, work on thin-slice judgments suggests that social evaluations may be made very quickly, to the extent that they are an automatic rather than a controlled process. Ambady and Rosenthal (1992) reported that evalu-ative judgments made from ‘‘fleeting glimpses’ ’ or thin slices of expressive behavior were accurate given as little as 30 seconds of exposure. Bar, Neta, and Linz (2006) found that consistent facial impressions were formed from just 39ms of exposure. However, Carney, Colvin, and Hall (2007) determined that the accuracy of such first impressions depends on the judgment being made. We reasoned that irrespective of whether snap judgments of character were accurate or not, they might provide accurate predictions of voting decisions well in advance of polling day, even before candidates had announced their intentions to run for election. To test this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment to discover whether candidate