Do First Impressions Affect Voting Results?

Overview

Objectives/Goals The Hypothesis of our experiment was to determine if first impression affects voting results (senate election, in particular). Methods/Materials Our project was conducted under two experiments. For the first experiment, we prepared 25 slides, consisting of 2 different senate candidates. From slides 1-20, each slide contained 2 previous senate candidates, one elected and one non-elected, from the same year and state. Slides 21-25 were designed to test the consistency of the subjects' decision. We repeated the pictures from the previous slides among 1-20. The second experiment was designed to test whether facial expression of a person would affect the voting result. We prepared 10 slides, each containing 2 pictures of different candidate with different facial expression. The slides in both experiments were shown to different age groups and gender, and they were required to mark their answers on the answer sheet. The subjects were not informed that our experiment was based on first impression, but that our project was to test how people respond to different images. Materials: PowerPoint Slide Show, computer, projector, answer sheet, writing utensil. Results 158 people had participated in our experiment. Experiment 1 had resulted with males over the age of 10 having 64.0% of accuracy from the real senate election results; females having 62.9%. Males had more consistency in their decisions. Males had a percentage of 66.7%, while females had a percentage of 59.7% in measuring consistencies. The results show that elections can be affected by one#s looks. In other words, whether one seems to have more leadership or not does affect the voting results. However, the results from the subjects under the age of 10 had a relatively low accuracy of 50.97%, showing that these young participants had less ability to distinguish which appearances should be considered to have more leadership. In Experiment 2 participants under the age of 10 had the highest result, in which 79.5% of the time the picture with a smiling face won. The age groups from teens through 40s also had a high tendency to choose the picture with a smile, 75.7%. However, participants over the age of 50 had a lower percentage in their tendency to choose the picture with a positive facial expression. The results had an overall result of 76.5%, which indicates that images with a positive facial expression are significantly more favored.

Competition history

• CSEF 2010 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry S0308

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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