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I frequently caution against taking so-called “social science” research with anything less than a Siberian grain of salt. Especially when its findings conveniently dovetail with one’s own prejudices.
That said, some social science research is just too damned funny not to write about.
Such as a Danish study that apparently confirms what we all knew anyway: leftists really are uglier than conservatives. Women especially.
For females (though not males), high attractiveness scores were found among those the model identified as likely to be conservative. These results are credible given that previous research using human raters has also highlighted a link between attractiveness and conservatism […]
Attractiveness was not the only correlate of model-predicted ideology. We also found that expressing happiness is associated with conservatism for both genders.
Which, again, isn’t a surprise, given that other studies have shown that conservatives tend to be happier than liberals (I use the word liberal in the contemporary American usage, where it pertains to left-wing authoritarianism). Indeed, one of the most conservative communities in America, the Amish, are ranked among the happiest and healthiest.
The Danish study explored how well faces could be used as a predictor of ideology.
The present study explores the relationship between faces and ideology using a large, publicly-available sample containing both facial photographs and ideological data – namely, 3233 Danish political candidates for local office. We use a wide range of techniques, including convolutional neural networks, heat maps, analyses of facial expressions, and assessments of physical characteristics such as masculinity and beauty.
Bear in mind, too, that the photos are presumably the subjects of all political persuasions looking their best.
Recall that we use photographs provided by the candidates themselves while campaigning for (low-level) political office. Because attractiveness generally helps electoral success, all candidates are incentivized to provide an attractive photograph.
It’s often said that politics is showbusiness for ugly people, but that may just be the left-media, as always, judging everyone prejudicially by the people they surround themselves with.
Using candidates in local politics was a careful choice by the researchers.
These photos are a publicly-available resource, provided for use in the public sphere by the candidates themselves to the Danish Broadcasting Cooperation (DR). Danish municipal elections take place in a non-polarized setting. Candidates running for office in these elections have not been highly selected through competitive elections in party organizations or by participation in high-stakes elections, and they are thus described as the “last amateurs in politics” by Danish political scientists.
In other words, these are the faces least polished by the political machine.
Results on the full primary sample provided accuracies of 61 per cent both for males and for females. These numbers are normed such that using a coin-flip to predict the ideology of the person in the image would be expected to succeed 50 per cent of the time. Our models are therefore better at predicting ideology than a random guess.
Nature
As we saw, the result was that conservative women indeed tend to be more attractive than left-wing women – even when the lefty is a woman, rather than a man wearing lipstick.
And the best part of conservative women is that they very rarely have a cock.
