2024/09/19 by Yaoguang Jiang, Annamarie W. Huttunen, Naz Belkaya +1 · 1 voice
Psychology · Neuroscience · Social Sciences · #Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Gaze #Voting #Social psychology #Sensory cue #Politics #Function (biology) #Voting behavior #Face (sociological concept) #Psychology #Political science #Cognitive psychology #Political economy #Sociology #Law #Biology #Evolutionary biology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1101/2024.09.17.613526
openalex publication_date 2024/09/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Abstract How people vote often defies rational explanation. Physical traits sometimes sway voters more than policies do–but why? Here we show that rhesus macaques, who have no knowledge about political candidates or their policies, implicitly predict the outcomes of U.S. gubernatorial and senatorial elections based solely on visual features. Given a pair of candidate photos, monkeys spent more time looking at the loser than the winner, and this gaze bias predicted not only binary election outcomes but also the candidates’ vote share. Analysis of facial features revealed candidates with more masculine faces were more likely to win an election, and vote share was a linear function of jaw prominence. Our findings endorse the idea that voters spontaneously respond to evolutionarily conserved visual cues to physical prowess and that voting behavior is shaped, in part, by ancestral adaptations shared with nonhuman primates. Significance Statement We report that monkeys and humans alike respond spontaneously to evolutionarily conserved facial masculinity cues in political candidates, and this innate sensitivity partly shapes voting behavior, highlighting the imperative for voters to overcome this ancient heuristic by becoming more informed on candidates and their policies.