Fit to Serve
Jan 18th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Looks can win votes—but being too pretty can lose them
NAMED last week as his party's candidate for the French presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy faces an opponent, Ségolène Royal, who has the press drooling. “Dazzling” and “radiant”, she has been likened to a work of art (“Mona Lisa”) and a mythological figure (a “siren”).
Perhaps Mr Sarkozy should pay a visit to Chattanooga, Tennessee. The city's former mayor, Bob Corker, faced a similar problem in his Senate race last November. He prevailed against a congressman, Harold Ford junior, who was once counted among the 50 “most beautiful” people on Washington's Capitol Hill. In response, Mr Corker hurled one of the strangest insults in campaign history. He accused Mr Ford of being “an attractive young man”.
“This is not a beauty pageant,” Ms Royal's detractors are fond of saying. But what makes them so sure? The days are gone when a person would “vote for a pig if his party put one up,” as one British voter put it in the 1950s. Today, politicians must be well-groomed animals, selling their personalities not their parties. Looks can have an especially powerful influence on the minority of floating voters who determine election results, says Linda Bilmes, a professor of government at America's Harvard University.
In Ecuador, for example, Rafael Correa won the presidency last year with headline-friendly promises and camera-friendly looks. His “party” was an afterthought. In India, political parties often seem like shapeless nebulae illuminated by star candidates. The southern state of Tamil Nadu was the first to elect a film star as its chief minister. After his death in 1987, the position fell to two former actresses—his third wife and the inimitable Jayalalitha Jayaram, who rose to screen-stardom, according to one fans' website, “because of the frenzy for blond skin”.
It is tempting to try to prove that good looks win votes, and many academics have tried. The difficulty is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you cannot behold a politician's face without a veil of extraneous prejudice getting in the way. Does George Bush possess a disarming grin, or a facetious smirk? It's hard to find anyone who can look at the president without assessing him politically as well as physically.
Such difficulties do not apply to Jyrki Kasvi. This fine-looking but little known fellow has represented the Uusimaa constituency in Finland's parliament since 2003. He was one of thousands of Finnish candidates whose looks were evaluated, on a scale of one to five, in one of the biggest-ever studies of beauty in politics, undertaken last year by three economists in Sweden and Finland*. The candidates' campaign photographs were rated by more than 2,000 non-Finns. Unclouded by politics (none of the candidates was recognised) the scorers showed a surprising amount of cross-cultural consensus—although the French were as usual notably harsh judges.
Did good looks really go together with electoral success? Incumbents could get by without them, the study found. But for newcomers, physical appeal might make all the difference: among the women, 65% of successful candidates were more beautiful than the average non-incumbent. For men, the share was 57%. A handsome man (ie, a perfect five) enjoys an edge over an ugly rival (ie, someone scoring only one) worth 6-8% of the vote. For the best-looking women, this edge is worth as much as ten percentage points.
Not everyone looks good in the same way, of course. Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin triumphed in 2004 over an opponent ten years younger and better-looking. What let his opponent down, according to Leslie Zebrowitz, a psychologist at Brandeis University and Joann Montepare of Emerson College, was his “neotenous facial anatomy” or, to put it more simply, his “babyface”. Apparently, men blessed with round faces, big eyes, small noses and high foreheads are perceived as less competent, whatever their age.
All this looks bad for Britain's Conservatives and their neotenous leader, David Cameron. But in Tennessee, Mr Corker's “attractive” rival was young, not baby-faced. So why did Mr Corker focus so hard on looks? “It was meant to demean,” says Tom Lee, who advised Mr Ford's campaign. He likens it to calling a sportsman an “athlete”, implying that unlike his rivals, he does not need to work very hard for success.
Mr Lee doubts this tactic affected the outcome. What voters want in their politicians, he says, is “authenticity”; to know that “you are who you appear to be”. Mr Ford, he says, could look equally authentic orating in a pricey suit or vote-hunting in a camouflaged baseball cap.
Of course, this advice is easier to swallow if you are authentically beautiful. Everyone else must think carefully about how real to be. Al Gore did not try hard enough: he wore too much make-up in his first presidential debate. Richard Nixon was too authentic by half: he lost his 1960 face-off with John Kennedy for want of a bit of powder which could have concealed his stubbly chin.
Perhaps the last, best example of the authentically slovenly politician is sitting in a prison cell in Rochester, New York. James Traficant, a defiantly unkempt congressman elected nine times by Ohio's 17th district, was expelled from the House in 2002 after being convicted of bribery, racketeering and tax evasion. His parting confession? “Do I do my hair with a weed whacker? I admit [it].”
*“The Looks of a Winner” by Niclas Berggren, Henrik Jordahl and Panu Poutvaara. IZA Discussion Paper 2311.
http://economist.com/world/international/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=8559767
叫人想起小馬哥。
The triumph of unreason?
Jan 11th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Why you are not always rational with your credit card
NEOCLASSICAL economics is built on the assumption that humans are rational beings who have a clear idea of their best interests and strive to extract maximum benefit (or “utility”, in economist-speak) from any situation. In this account, price is a signal that helps you decide the combination of work, spending and saving that suits you best. Neoclassical economics assumes that the process of decision-making is rational. But that contradicts growing evidence that decision-making draws on the emotions—even when reason is clearly involved.
The role of emotions in decisions makes perfect sense. For situations met frequently in the past, such as obtaining food and mates, and confronting or fleeing from threats, the neural mechanisms required to weigh up the pros and cons will have been honed by evolution to produce an optimal outcome. Since emotion is the mechanism by which animals are prodded towards such outcomes, evolutionary and economic theory predict the same practical consequences for utility in these cases. But does this still apply when the ancestral machinery has to respond to the stimuli of urban modernity?
One of the people who thinks that it does not is George Loewenstein, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. In particular, he suspects that modern shopping has subverted the decision-making machinery in a way that encourages people to run up debt. To prove the point he has teamed up with two psychologists, Brian Knutson of Stanford University and Drazen Prelec of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to look at what happens in the brain when it is deciding what to buy.
Discounting the future
In a study just published in Neuron, the three researchers asked 26 volunteers to decide whether to buy a series of products such as a box of Godiva chocolates or a DVD of the television show “Sex and the City” that were flashed on a computer screen one after another. In each round of the task, the researchers first presented the product and then its price, with each step lasting four seconds. In the final stage, which also lasted four seconds, they asked the volunteers to make up their minds. To make the task more realistic, two randomly selected sales were real—paid for out of a $40 credit from which the volunteer got to keep the change, as well.
While the volunteers were taking part in the experiment, the researchers scanned their brains using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This measures blood flow and oxygen consumption in the brain, as an indication of its activity.
The researchers found that different parts of the brain were involved at different stages of the test. The nucleus accumbens—known from previous experiments to be involved in processing rewarding stimuli such as food, recreational drugs and monetary gain, as well as in the anticipation of those rewards—was the most active part when a product was being displayed.
Moreover, the level of its activity correlated with the reported desirability of the product in question.
When the price appeared, however, fMRI reported more activity in other parts of the brain. Excessively high prices increased activity in the insular cortex, a brain region linked to expectations of pain, monetary loss and the viewing of upsetting pictures. The researchers also found greater activity in this region of the brain when the subject decided not to purchase an item.
Price information activated the medial prefrontal cortex, too. This part of the brain is involved in rational calculation, and is known from previous experiments using trading games to be involved in balancing the expected and actual outcomes of monetary decisions. In this experiment its activity seemed to correlate with a volunteer's reaction to both product and price, rather than to price alone. Thus, the sense of a good bargain evoked higher activity levels in the medial prefrontal cortex, and this often preceded a decision to buy.
People's shopping behaviour therefore seems to have piggy-backed on old neural circuits evolved for anticipation of reward and the avoidance of hazards. What Dr Loewenstein found interesting was the separation of the assessment of the product (which seems to be associated with the nucleus accumbens) from the assessment of its price (associated with the insular cortex), even though the two are then synthesised in the prefrontal cortex. His hypothesis is that rather than weighing the present good against future alternatives, as orthodox economics suggests happens, people actually balance the immediate pleasure of the prospective possession of a product with the immediate pain of paying for it.
That makes perfect sense as an evolved mechanism for trading. If one useful object is being traded for another (or, in the modern context, for hard cash), the future utility of what is being given up is embedded in the object being traded. Emotion is as capable of assigning such a value as reason. Buying on credit, though, may be different. The abstract nature of credit cards, coupled with the deferment of payment that they promise, may modulate the “con” side of the calculation in favour of the “pro”.
Whether it actually does so will be the subject of further experiments that the three researchers are now designing. These will test whether people with distinctly different spending behaviour, such as miserliness and extravagance, experience different amounts of pain (or, at least, show different patterns of brain activity) in response to prices. They will also assess whether, in the same individuals, buying with credit cards eases the pain compared with paying by cash. If they find that it does, then credit cards may have to join the list of things such as fatty and sugary foods, and recreational drugs, that subvert human instincts in ways that seem pleasurable at the time but can have a long and malign aftertaste.
http://economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=8516366
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