A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that 64 percent of Republicans have a “strongly unfavorable” view of Hillary Clinton, and 42 percent of all Americans say they’d never vote for her for president. But a recent Washington Post-Stanford study showed that citizens of all political persuasions react favorably to Sen. Clinton’s face. Or, more accurately, a face containing some proportion of her image.
What this could mean for Sen. Clinton if she runs for president is unknown. But it sure interests communication and political science professor Shanto Iyengar.
In February, Iyengar designed an online experiment for 2,200 readers of the Washington Post to test familiarity bias in voting behavior. Working with colleague Jeremy Bailenson, who oversees Stanford’s virtual human interaction lab, Iyengar created two fictitious candidates—Paul and Paula Vaughn—and morphed photographs of two relatively unknown faces (Rep. Mary Bono and Rep. Ed Case) with better-known faces (Clinton, Sen. John McCain or former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani) or lesser-known faces (Sen. Evan Bayh or Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison). Two levels of morphing were used to create the candidates: for example, 80 percent unknown and 20 percent Clinton, or 60 percent unknown and 40 percent McCain.
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Courtesy Nick Yee |
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Clinton’s face stood out from the crowd. “Senator Clinton is the only candidate for whom greater visual resemblance is a positive cue,” wrote Iyengar and Post writer Richard Morin. “Increasing the similarity to Senator Clinton’s face enhances Vaughn’s support in every single experimental condition. Increasing the similarity to any of the other candidates reduces Vaughn’s support.” What’s more, the effect of the Clinton morph registered with a variety of voters—men and women, Democrats, Independents and Republicans.
Iyengar has signed on with the Post to deliver one online experiment per month for a year. “It’s always nice to get out of the ivory tower and have an audience that consists of real, ordinary people,” he says. “And I’ve been impressed with the quality of the questions that are posed [by readers].”
Iyengar acknowledges that the Post readers comprise a “very, very narrow sample” that has only 12 percent Republicans—“they’re hard to find in Washington, almost like Palo Alto.” But he argues that “the whole point is to try and produce a version of social science that is of interest to a layperson.”
A specialist in the areas of political communication and mass media effects, Iyengar gets a kick out of another experiment—a takeoff on the “Whack-a-Mole!” carnival game, in which players bash stuffed animals with a wooden mallet when they pop out of holes in a table. In Whack-a-Pol, online players instead click on faces of celebrities, dictators or politicians.
“There’s an interesting phenomenon in American politics, namely the idea that the two sides are becoming more and more embittered,” Iyengar says. “And that was exactly what we found, that in the political version of the game there was a pattern of Democrats singling out people like Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly, and the Republicans singling out Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.” In other words, whacking was partisan.
In Whack-a-Celebrity and Whack-a-Dictator, however, “there was more or less an equal-opportunity strategy,” Iyengar says. “Anyone who showed up, you just hit him, whether it was Saddam Hussein or Josef Stalin.”
Iyengar is particularly keen on a study he designed that looks at how the public feels about government assistance to victims of Hurricane Katrina. In one part of the study, Washington Post participants read news stories about victims accompanied by photos of a person, Terry Miller (or Medina), who appeared either African-American, Hispanic, Asian or white. Among the results: readers who saw the white Terry recommended that she or he receive government assistance for a longer period than those who saw the African-American Terry. Iyengar and Morin concluded that these and other findings related to racial cues in the stories are “testimony to the persistent and primordial power of racial imagery in American life.”
