Right-wing People More Attractive

[Darth Wedgius]

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jan/31/hunky-tory-attractive-people-more-likely-to-be-rightwing-study-finds

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/caveman-politics/201803/science-weighs-in-conservatives-look-better

Fun aside, the cause and effect relationship might be that better-looking people are treated better and that might lead us to be more conservative.

[GreyICE]

Ah, lets find the study and have some fun.

https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/about-dev.illinoisstate.edu/dist/2/123/files/2019/10/Peterson-Palmer-The-Effects-of-Physical-Attractiveness-on-Political-Attitudes.pdf

It generally seems to be decent science. They start off by describing a mechanism of action and demonstrating its existence (attractive children are treated better from a very young age) and establishing that mistreatment and adversity may influence your political beliefs more liberal.

They admit the drawback of the work: they're on relatively novel ground. Unfortunately, that means their dataset is a bit crap:

The paucity of work examining the political implications of physical appearance at the individual level is partially due to a lack of datasets containing both measures of attractiveness and viable political variables. To test the above hypotheses, we take advantage of two relatively unique datasets: the 1972-74-76 American National Elections Study (ANES) panel study and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS).

There's some significant drawbacks to parsing someone else's data set to gather variables for your own. Since it wasn't gathered with your data in mind, it might have missed things that would have a substantial impact on your hypothesis. In addition the data is quite dated. The most recent is 44 years ago, and politics were fairly different during the Nixon administration. But as they say, they can't find more data. And they presumably didn't have funding to get more data.

Overall, they're researching a novel effect, and are clearly fishing about for more funding to do something slightly better than what they did here. It's an interesting preliminary result. There's a lot of discussion and studies of the effects of privilege on political beliefs, but the authors are right that physical attractiveness of voters (as opposed to politicians) is not commonly studied.

The one thing I'd note as a potential flaw is that the authors seem extremely convinced that physical attractiveness is universal and unchanging, and that's not something they adequately supported. Still, the paper really isn't about that, as simply being 'perceived as attractive by much of society for most of their lives' would be sufficient to have an opportunity to change their behaviors and beliefs.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Right-wing people tend to be more customary. And its establishment tends to have comparatively superficial values compared to leftists.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

There's people out there furiously beating meat and flicking beans to Pennywise, sans the skeleton, and Queen Chrysalis from My Little Pony, then go out and have the audacity to suggest that "attractiveness" is some kind of externally determined metric.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

There's people out there furiously beating meat and flicking beans to Pennywise, sans the skeleton, and Queen Chrysalis from My Little Pony, then go out and have the audacity to suggest that "attractiveness" is some kind of externally determined metric.

I think attractiveness by definition is determined by a human condition subject to proportional measures. What's attractive can objectively be measured by how many people agree with a subject's appeal.

[GreyICE]

There's people out there furiously beating meat and flicking beans to Pennywise, sans the skeleton, and Queen Chrysalis from My Little Pony, then go out and have the audacity to suggest that "attractiveness" is some kind of externally determined metric.

As I said, that's the single weakest point they made, but it's also clear that point is secondary to the hypothesis.

All their hypothesis requires is that enough of the general public treats the affected population favorably due to their perceived attractiveness for them to reap the benefit of perceived attractiveness, and for those benefits and privileges to shift their political beliefs in the conservative direction.

I'm not sure they fully proved their point, but they didn't claim they did. All they said was basically "it's promising, and the research is novel." As far as I can tell, they're correct about both points.

This is pretty far from settled science, but in comparison to a lot of the shit that gets posted here (the ridiculous white power "libruls are all crazy" garbage, the painfully bad "religion makes you racist" shit) it's actually pretty good science, as long as you don't take it for more than it claims to be.

There's people out there furiously beating meat and flicking beans to Pennywise, sans the skeleton, and Queen Chrysalis from My Little Pony, then go out and have the audacity to suggest that "attractiveness" is some kind of externally determined metric.

I think attractiveness by definition is determined by a human condition subject to proportional measures. What's attractive can objectively be measured by how many people agree with a subject's appeal.

Unfortunately the paper went further, and tried to argue for universal characteristics of attractiveness. I don't quite know why, since their methodology didn't require it - they had people rate attractiveness of yearbook photos, which is plenty fine to measure "how this population, on average, perceives the subject's attractiveness." You don't need to hypothesize that is universal across cultures, since these were Americans who grew up in America - you only need them to be seen as attractive in one culture.

It was pretty unnecessary, but I was only looking at the pre-publication draft (those are MUCH easier to find online in PDF form) so maybe it got cut from the final paper. Shit like that slips in to even published stuff from time to time.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

There's people out there furiously beating meat and flicking beans to Pennywise, sans the skeleton, and Queen Chrysalis from My Little Pony, then go out and have the audacity to suggest that "attractiveness" is some kind of externally determined metric.

I think attractiveness by definition is determined by a human condition subject to proportional measures. What's attractive can objectively be measured by how many people agree with a subject's appeal.

Unfortunately the paper went further, and tried to argue for universal characteristics of attractiveness. I don't quite know why, since their methodology didn't require it - they had people rate attractiveness of yearbook photos, which is plenty fine to measure "how this population, on average, perceives the subject's attractiveness." You don't need to hypothesize that is universal across cultures, since these were Americans who grew up in America - you only need them to be seen as attractive in one culture.

It was pretty unnecessary, but I was only looking at the pre-publication draft (those are MUCH easier to find online in PDF form) so maybe it got cut from the final paper. Shit like that slips in to even published stuff from time to time.

Universal would be a far too precise word to ever be spoken by a mere conservative. Normalized fits the landscape a little better but is taken for granted as a concept and is hard to emphasize. Gender roles are "normalized," for instance.

Attractiveness is normalized I think because it tends to follow a pattern recognized intergenerationally with expected variance in trends what not. It's also intertwined with our evolutionary construct, so it's pretty rooted.

[GreyICE]

Universal would be a far too precise word to ever be spoken by a mere conservative. Normalized fits the landscape a little better but is taken for granted as a concept and is hard to emphasize. Gender roles are "normalized," for instance.

Attractiveness is normalized I think because it tends to follow a pattern recognized intergenerationally with expected variance in trends what not. It's also intertwined with our evolutionary construct, so it's pretty rooted.

Universal was exactly the term they used. You should probably read the paper.

The conceptualization of what is attractive could, in theory, vary somewhat across individuals, although evidence suggests that criteria for attractiveness appear to be consistent within cultural groups [88], be universal and determined by social consensus [45, 89],and stable over time [90]. Additionally, recent research has demonstrated relative consistency across evaluations of appearance, regardless of who is doing the evaluating [18, 85].

As I said, their hypothesis requires none of that:

How might these appearance-based experiences translate into political behavior?When evaluating the political sophistication of others, physically attractive individuals are seen as more knowledgeable and persuasive, and are more likely to be sought out by others as political informants regardless of their actual levels of political information [67]. We posit that interactions that more attractive individuals have with others should have powerful and lasting effects on how those individuals come to understand not only their social world, but the political world as well. We see clear parallels between the impact of a lifetime of differential treatment due to one’s appearance and the more specific process of political socialization, through which long-term political orientations are inculcated beginning at a young age...

Having not faced the challenges of other citizens, more attractive individuals shouldbe less supportive of remedying these challenges for the general public. Even though this blind spot may not be universally held and that physically attractive individuals do not always have easier lives, on average, physically attractive individuals face fewer hurdles navigating the social world. Consequently, we would expect that more attractive individuals would be more likely to identify as both conservative, and, relatedly, with the Republican party.5

As I said, the idea of universal attractiveness that's stable over long time periods isn't necessary to this. It simply has to be stable across their developmental years, and affect enough of the people they interact with to influence their beliefs.

It's also intertwined with our evolutionary construct

Also, this is the difference between overreach in scientific papers, and overreach in the general population. Because even when scientists overreach, it's little baby stuff. When the general population does it, it's these hilarious leaps.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Universal would be a far too precise word to ever be spoken by a mere conservative. Normalized fits the landscape a little better but is taken for granted as a concept and is hard to emphasize. Gender roles are "normalized," for instance.

Attractiveness is normalized I think because it tends to follow a pattern recognized intergenerationally with expected variance in trends what not. It's also intertwined with our evolutionary construct, so it's pretty rooted.

Universal was exactly the term they used. You should probably read the paper.

Oh I'm not querying you. Just that conservatives never really have any business using the term in the first place. Attractiveness is typically normalized though as far as how they assess things, they just take it as objective universalism.

[Beastro]

One outcome of anyone superficially looking at this would be interesting. That is, to see if some use it as justification for their prejudices.

A similar example I can think of was news of the DNA results of Europeans having bits of Neanderthal in them. As soon as I read that, I knew White Supremacists would take it as proof of their innate superiority while Black Supremacists would take it as proof that whites aren't human.

Since then, I've seen both sides voice those very positions.

Right-wing people tend to be more customary. And its establishment tends to have comparatively superficial values compared to leftists.

I counterpoint to that might be that right-wing people tend to practice what they preach compared to the left. I recall a study years ago linked on another forum about recycling and how the left-wingers in the test talked about recycling but actually didn't do it all that much while the right-wingers didn't talk much at all but did it far more frequently.

With what you say, it might be that many don't think it through enough on their own and just do it because it's become established.