Despite much hand-wringing over whether Mitt Romney is conservative enough for today’s GOP, he has found success in the Republican primaries. So what explains it? Perhaps it’s because Romney looks Republican. New research finds that Republicans tend to vote for the more Republican face. To determine whether a candidate had a more Republican face, researchers asked people to pick out the Republican from black-and-white headshots of the two major party candidates in various gubernatorial or Senate elections. It turns out that, in contests among Republican-leaning voters and where both candidates were white males, having a more Republican face boosted a candidate’s share of the vote, regardless of his party affiliation. In contrast, among Democratic-leaning voters, facial stereotypes did not seem to matter, aside from the observation of gender, ethnicity, and age.
Loving the Republican face
Uncommon Knowledge
Olivola, C. et al., “‘Republicans Prefer Republican-Looking Leaders: Political Facial Stereotypes Predict Candidate Electoral Success among Right-Leaning Voters,” Social Psychological and Personality Science (forthcoming).
Putting the B in bro
To many, college fraternities are defined by their caricature in the movie “Animal House”-- as a bunch of hedonistic troublemakers. As with any stereotype, though, this is often not the case. According to a recent analysis, both fraternities and sororities might be better described as affiliations of B+ students. Fraternities and sororities tend to reject low-performing students, whose future prospects (and alumni donations) are not bright. Meanwhile, high-performing students tend not to rush fraternities and sororities to avoid being lumped in with lower-performing students. Analyzing actual grades from seniors at the University of Illinois, the authors confirm this pattern, finding that the odds of being in a fraternity or sorority are much greater for students with GPAs between 3.0 and 3.4 than for students with GPAs near 2.0 or 4.0.
Popov, S. & Bernhardt, D., “Fraternities and Labor Market Outcomes,” American Economic Journal: Microeconomics (forthcoming).
Rock, rock, rock