Election Day is fast approaching. Have you made up your mind on who to vote for? Or are you still deliberating?

In any case, you are likely to believe that your political decision is, or will be, based on thoughtful consideration alone. But you may be wrong, says a substantial body of research.

Some years ago, economists in Finland and Germany independently reported that parliament candidates who were rated as more attractive won more votes.

More recently, economist Andrew Leigh and this writer found that ratings of facial beauty predicted vote share in the Northern Territory state election in Australia. They also observed that skin color matters. Darker skinned candidates got a larger vote share in electorates where the majority of the population was of darker skin, whereas lighter skinned candidates performed better in electorates with more lighter skinned people.

In a summary of hundreds of studies on character evaluation based on facial appearance, psychologist Judith Langlois concluded that people who were judged to be more beautiful tend to be evaluated more positively across the board – including in the political domain.

All this suggests that voting decisions can be influenced by irrelevant facial characteristics such as attractiveness and race.

Now, before you insist that this research finding does not apply to you, consider the following study.

In 2004, psychologist Alexander Todorov and his colleagues flashed faces for less than a second on a computer screen and asked people to make a rapid, intuitive judgment of attractiveness, competence and trustworthiness.

Unbeknownst to the raters, the faces belonged to candidates for the US Senate election. Todorov then tested whether the rating of facial characteristics was predictive of vote share. It was. A one-second evaluation of a face could predict who was going to get the vote. Now how on earth was that possible?

The answer is a profound lesson from the last 50 years of psychology research: The power of the unconscious brain. Simply stated, there are two brain systems mediating human decision making.

One is the intuitive system, which is always operating without our awareness. This is the unconscious brain, one that automatically generates inferences from faces. The other is the rational system, which needs to be proactively turned on. This is the conscious brain, one that slowly weighs the pros and cons of the candidates.

And herein lays the problem. The intuitive system always decides whether to like a face or not a few seconds before this preference enters awareness.

This rapid and automatic process, for a whole host of evolutionary reasons, has served the human species well. But when it comes to electing modern political leaders, it is nothing but problematic.

What voters need to do is to activate their rational system, and consciously remind themselves of the reasons behind their vote. When political information is incomplete, and voters are not well-versed on the issues at stake, the unconscious brain will take charge and cast the ballot.

For the past few months or so, candidates’ faces have been, and still are, mushrooming in every corner of our country. Day and night, our visual brain is constantly fed these faces. We should not let this irrelevant information get in our way.

The importance of this insight, at this particular moment in our country’s democratic journey, cannot be overstated. We cannot be compromised in electing the right leaders.

So voters, beware of those faces.

The writer is a doctoral candidate in the Psychology Department at the Australian National University, Canberra.

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