A new study published by scientists in Denmark has demonstrated a correlation between physical attractiveness and political ideology, suggesting “right-wing” women are likely to be more attractive than “left-wing” women, who show more contempt which is reflected on their faces.
According to the study’s findings published in the Nature-owned journal Scientific Reports, attractive women are more likely to be “right-wing,” while women displaying contempt – a character trait that reflects on a person’s attractiveness, tend to lean more “left-wing.”
The study, conducted in March, used artificial intelligence (AI) learning techniques to predict political ideology from facial characteristics.
The AI could predict a person’s political ideology with an accuracy of 61% by analyzing one headshot.
In the study, researchers used 3,288 photographs of political candidates from the 2017 Danish Municipal election in order to find facial correlations.
The photos, which are a publicly-available resource, are fed into Microsoft Azure’s Face API tool to assess each person’s emotional state.
80% of the analyzed faces displayed a happy expression, while 19% were neutral.
According to The New York Post:
“Facial averages for males and females Note. Facial averages for the candidates with the 20 most extreme scores on predicted ideology for each gender. E.g., the facial average of the 20 male candidates with the most extreme predicted left-wing beliefs are top left.”
“For females (though not males), high attractiveness scores were found among those the model identified as likely to be conservative,” read the findings.
“These results are credible given that previous research using human raters has also highlighted a link between attractiveness and conservatism.”
The results were even more accurate for men, 65% before the researchers stripped their photos of visual imagery other than the man’s face — such as shirt collars.
The study found that left-leaning male politicians showed more neutral, less happy faces than their conservative counterparts.
“Attractiveness was not the only correlate of model-predicted ideology,” the scientists explained. “We also found that expressing happiness is associated with conservatism for both genders.
“Previous work has found smiling in photographs to be a valid indicator of extraversion,” they continued.
“And while extraversion is not broadly associated with ideology, some studies have found that right-wing politicians are more extraverted.”
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