A new study points out that people in general tend to perceive their preferred political candidate as better looking than the opponent.
The study was carried out by a team of researchers from Cornell University. The researchers pointed out that this phenomenon is common across all genders and around the globe.
"We showed pictures of familiar and unfamiliar political leaders to voters in two different samples and found that familiarity and partisanship each significantly influenced how candidates were perceived," said the study's lead researcher, said Kevin M. Kniffin, a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell's Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, in a press 8. "For example, Democrats rated Barack Obama as more physically attractive, and Republicans tended to rate Sarah Palin as better looking."
For the study, a group of participants were made to view pictures of political candidates "through partisan-colored lenses." In the second part of the study, researchers removed the partisan-colored lenses by asking study participants to view unlabeled pictures of unfamiliar political leaders from distant states. The study authors found that those unfamiliar candidates showed no favoritism based on political affiliation.
"There's no 'Republican look' or 'Democrat hairdo,'" Kniffin said in the statement. "If you don't recognize political leaders and can't view them through partisan lenses, they don't have the halos or horns that influence perceptions of familiar leaders."
Findings of the study titled "Beauty is in the in-group of the beholded: Intergroup differences in the perceived attractiveness of leaders" was published online in the journal The Leadership Quarterly. No details as to who funded the study were revealed.
