In order to distinguish perceptions of physical attractiveness from perceived personality, we capture two types of first impressions: overall attractiveness of the candidate and evaluations of personality traits. We first establish the overall impressions of candidates on attractiveness and trait evaluations through the use of a web survey administered to respondents recruited via the YouGOV webpage. Our purpose was to replicate how voters in these elections might have judged the appearance of these candidates so that we can compare the first impressions of the candidate to their fate on election day. The 521 recruited respondents (all from Great Britain) were asked to evaluate the attractiveness and personality traits of 10 candidates that were randomly displayed (one candidate per page) from the total sample of 212 candidates. All 212 candidates were rated for attractiveness and personality traits on a four point scale by, on average, 25 respondents.

In order to encourage evaluations of the photographs, respondents were reminded at the beginning of the web survey instrument of the following: It is important to remember that although people sometimes have very little information about candidates beyond seeing them in a picture, their perceptions of candidates can be surprisingly accurate (see Riggle et al. 1992, 72). In addition to candidate “attractiveness”, respondents were asked to evaluate candidates on the following six personality traits: trustworthiness, shares the respondent’s concerns, leadership, qualification, competence, and experience. The questions were phrased: “Please tell me how well you believe each of the following descriptions fit this candidate.” Possible responses were very well, somewhat well, not very well or not very well at all. These ratings from each respondent were then averaged across each candidate to create a score on each trait. Candidate attractiveness is most analogous to measures of candidate “beauty”, which we expect to influence traits, while the other characteristics are measure evaluations of personality traits. (The average responses to the individual items are summarized in the Appendix.) In order to create a summary of the personality traits of candidates we create a composite measure of the six personality trait indicators (alpha = .95).

Below are examples of the photographs along with the evaluations.

Min. value on attractiveness (1.28)    Min. value on personality traits (1.53)

Max. value on attractiveness (3.25)   Max. value on personality traits (3.11)

For further details on this study, see Susan A. Banducci, Jeffrey A. Karp, Michael Thrasher, and Colin Rallings. 2007. "Ballot Photographs as Cues in Low Information Elections" Working Paper, July 6, 2007.