Months of preparation, countless hours spent rehearsing answers to questions, and dozens of policy positions and platform stances having been vetted by focus group after focus group. With a near-incalculable amount of time spent to prepare Richard Nixon for his debate against the John F. Kennedy in 1960, the Nixon Campaign felt confident in its ability to sustain the lead that they had gained earlier in the presidential race. This debate, however, would be the tipping point in the 1960 presidential race, and it would serve as an example of the dos and do not’s in American politics for every debate to follow it. This is because the 1960 presidential debate was the first presidential debate to be televised. For the first time in American history an audience of millions watched the two candidates and judged far more than just their party affiliations and policy stances, because the for the first time in American history they could see the two candidates in action. The 1960 presidential debate was viewed almost unanimously as the victory that won the election for the Kennedy Campaign, and countless political scientists and historians claim that it was won by Kennedy’s appearance and behavior that many voters were able to see for the first time. But just what was it the voters saw that day that made them decide to vote for Kennedy over the previously favored Nixon? Was it his facial structure? Was it his outfit? Perhaps it was not Kennedy who won, but Nixon who lost the debate due to his notably less collected or favorable appearance? American politics was changed forever on that fateful day, as candidate appearance has been a top priority for nearly every major political campaign since. The appearance of American political candidates can greatly affect voter perception of a candidate in a number ways, and this has been proven to be highly determinate of electoral success.

It is an odd concept to accept that humans-the most intelligent creatures that this planet has ever known-could be so simplistic that they resort to judging political candidates and others simply by their appearance, but according to Leonard Mlodinow, this is hardly a stretch from the truth. Mlodinow is the author of the article “How We Are Judged by Our Appearance,” as well as Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, a book on the existence and operation of the human subconscious. Within his article in Psychology Today, he cites the research of a team from the University of California, Irvine that found that humans are instinctually drawn to making preconceived judgements on others around them based entirely on facial features alone. The researchers were also able to computer generate faces with certain physical traits that they were then able to link to certain preconceived judgements in test subjects (Mlodinow 9). Mlodinow goes on to cite another study, this time performed by a team from Princeton University, that exposed test subjects to the faces of two political candidates for a quarter of a second and then asked the subjects to determine which of the two they saw as being more competent. The results of the study showed that the test subjects chose the actual winners of the election seventy percent of the time (Mlodinow 10). These results not only prove that voters are prone to making preconceived judgements, but they also verify that these judgements are statistically significant to the process of candidate selection.

Nicholas Rule’s “Snap-Judgement Science,” closely resembles the ideas expressed in Richard Mlodinow’s article, and he goes on to explain the significance of the phenomenon on human beings’ interpersonal lives and assumptions of others. In his article, Rule describes how people can almost always tell how they are going to feel about someone within the first few moments of making visual contact (Rule 3). He states that “Before we can finish blinking our eyes, we’ve already decided whether we want to hire, date, hate, or make friends with a person we’re encountering for the first time” (Rule 3). He bases this conclusion on evidence found in a series of recent studies that investigated the existence and significance of these flash judgements (Rule References). Despite the numerous implications that this research could have on the understanding of basic human relationships, the study of this subject could be equally applied to the field of politics due to the demonstrated value of appearance in politics. Based on Rule’s interpretations, a candidate’s appearance could very well be a crucial factor in deciding that candidate’s electoral success due to the previously stated importance of the first impressions that come from these visual assumptions.   

Marina Krakovsky accepts the broader principles discussed by Leonard Mlodinow in his article and she builds onto them by discussing how these snap judgements made almost inadvertently by humans are made by preconceived stereotypes of the demographic that a person is visibly assigned to. She discusses a study performed by a joint team of individuals from Harvard, Princeton, and Lawrence University that found that humans tend to make judgements on people based on the demographic they appear to be belong to, and then assess that person based on subconscious measurements of warmth and competence (Krakovsky 1). The team describes how the human mind is wont to make these judgements of an individual’s warmth or competence based almost entirely on their perceived demographic (Krakovsky 2). The results of this study suggest the power that stereotypes have over the thoughts and opinions of voters, as this demographic-based judgement system can be easily applied to the modern American politics, where a growing number of voters are unaware of candidates’ specific policies and positions, and base their decision more on the candidates’ perceived personality and character traits as a result. 

The growing ignorance of political stances has fueled the influence that politicians’ appearance and personality have on the voting population, and this has resulted in an increase in attention from political campaigns being placed on making their candidate physically appear as trustworthy and competent, but how much can be done to make someone appear more or less of any chosen trait than they are already perceived as? According to research performed by Jonathan B. Freeman and a team from Dartmouth University and New York University, not 

much. The team performed a study that monitored activity in the amygdala of test subjects when they were exposed to computer augmented faces that were designed to appear as either trustworthy or not. The results of the study indicated that the not only do humans associate certain facial traits with being trustworthy or untrustworthy, it found that these decisions are almost always made subconsciously. The results of the study concluded that “The amygdala can be influenced by even high-level facial information before that information is consciously perceived” (Freeman 10580). These results suggest that an ideal political appearance is not something that can be created or altered, as it is a more or less permanent part of a candidate’s appearance, but it also examines how much influence appearance has on the judgements made about a candidate, and how the majority of these judgements are made subconsciously. 

The research performed by Jonathan B. Freeman and his team from Dartmouth University and New York University exemplified the crucial role played by the human subconscious in the assessment of human character traits, and Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk expand on this by analyzing the ways that the human subconscious functions to determine which candidate to vote for and why. Lau and Redlawsk assert that the subconscious mind operates on a series of specialized heuristics that help in determining how a person will vote when party affiliation or candidate stances on certain issues are not enough to sway their decision (Lau 969). They performed a study simulating a general election that featured fictitious candidates and they tracked the thought processes of the participants using process-tracing methodologies to confirm that “Virtually all voters employ cognitive heuristics at least some of the time in their vote decisions” (Lau 958-969).  The authors go on to describe how these heuristics can vary by party affiliation and can ultimately be highly influential in the final determination of who an individual chooses to vote for and why (Lau 969). 

The findings of Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk in conjunction with the results of the study cited by Marina Krakovsky definitively conclude that the majority of American voters tend to turn on a sort of autopilot that quickly makes assumptions about an individual based on perceived demographic when it comes to candidate selection. The human subconscious, which represents this autopilot function, has proven to be a significant part of the average voter’s decision-making process, and many of the assumptions taken into consideration by the human subconscious come from visual cues or features observed in political candidates. The adhesion of these previously separate conclusions would then indicate that appearance is one of the largest factors in determining that candidate’s electoral success.      

However, there are those-like Danny Hayes and his team of researchers-who would dispute the concept of candidates’ physical appearance is the key to deciding electoral success, and instead name more traditional factors as the true dictators of the average voter’s political decisions. This team of researchers performed a study with the intent of discovering whether or not media coverage of political candidates was the strongest factor in determining the outcomes of elections by exposing test subjects to news coverage of different congressional candidates that mentioned candidate appearance positively, negatively, or not at all (Hayes 1194). The results of the study found that “When Americans go to the polls, they are far more likely to vote based on the candidates’ party affiliations or ideological leanings than on the lines around their eyes or the size of their waistline” (Hayes 1209). Despite the findings of this study differing from the conclusions reached by the other sources in this essay, they do not necessarily oppose the interpretations of the previous authors. This is because the other authors actually agree that Americans vote on the basis of partisanship and political ideology, but they find that American voters interpret much of a candidate’s party affiliation and personal traits based on the information they subconsciously gather from a candidate’s appearance. 

This idea that voters are making subconscious judgements about candidates’ political ideology based on their appearance is further supported and defined by the research of Michaela Wänke and his team, who claim that political ideologies can be manifested into a person or candidate’s physical features that other humans can subconsciously observe. This team bases its conclusion on the findings and theories of other authors and on the results they found from their own experiment. They performed this experiment by exposing test subjects to two pairs of pictures of politicians for periods of one and a half seconds and seven seconds, and then asking them to decide if one or either of the politicians appeared to be more conservative based on their photograph alone (Wänke 15). The results of the experiment found that sixty of the seventy-six participants were “significantly above chance level in their overall accuracy,” while seven of the participants were significantly below chance level” (Wänke 16). The findings of this study indicate that humans are not only capable of accurately detecting political ideologies from looks alone, but they are capable of doing so in very short amounts of time (Wänke 17). The fact that humans are capable of detecting such predilections from a candidate’s appearance alone could mean that people have preconstructed schemas regarding the different political parties ideal appearance. Wänke and his team also assert that the combination of the subconscious ability to visually detect political preferences and the existence of preconceived ideas about what a particular party member should look like could contribute to a politician’s electoral success by adding or subtracting legitimacy to that individual’s claim based on whether or not they look like their chosen political faction (Wänke 20). The team concluded by stating “Looking like what you are seems to be an asset in politics” (Wänke 20). 

Similarly to the claims made by Marina Krakovsky, Dr. Marwa Azab maintains that the human brain can be divided into the logical brain and the reflexive brain, the latter of which she characterizes as being the silent hand that makes the decisions that people are not aware they are making (Azab 1). In her article on Psychology Today, Dr. Azab goes on to explain how the reflexive brain, or subconscious mind, makes it all but impossible for humans to avoid making snap judgements of others (Azab 2). She details the operation of the reflexive brain by noting the use of stereotypes to help the brain rapidly interpret the environment around it, which closely resembles the findings of nearly all of the previously mentioned authors. These similarities are crucially significant in that they further demonstrate the underlying harmony between the different ideas expressed by each of the authors. 

The innerworkings of American politics is among the most researched subjects in the country today, and for good reason. The largest political campaigns can cost billions of dollars, and so many of these expenditures go towards the research and implementation of advertising and marketing strategies that will cause the voting population to view a candidate in the most favorable way possible. But according to the analyses of the experts mentioned in this essay these gargantuan expenditures are being allocated appropriately. An underlying sonority rings through each of the authors’ seemingly different claims; a single, indisputable message that proves that appearance not only matters in politics, but that it is arguably the largest factor in determining electoral success in modern elections. The works of Leonard Mlodinow, Nicholas Rule, Marina Krakovsky, and Dr. Marwa Azab explore the operation of the human subconscious and how it plays a crucial role in the determination of humans’ assumptions of other people. Their work becomes especially relevant to the study of American Politics when conjoined with the ideas and conclusions gathered by Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk, Jonathan B. Freeman and his research team, and Michaela Wänke and his research team. The studies and experiments performed by these individuals illustrate the ways that the human subconscious is able to create opinions about candidates and reliably make accurate assumptions about a candidate’s political ideologies through the use of heuristics that interpret a candidate’s appearance alone. The amalgamation of each of these author’s claims and findings ultimately leads to the conclusion that physical appearance is perhaps the most influential factor on a political candidate’s electoral success. The utilization of this information is of paramount importance to any political campaign, as it not only validates the seemingly outrageous sums of campaign funding spent on advertisements, but it also proves that these advertisements could be more efficacious if they were used to illustrate the most favorable physical appearance possible in addition to bringing attention to the candidate’s qualifications or the shortcomings of their opponents. One might believe that they are above judging a book by its cover, but the reality is that the leaders of United States have been decided using this seemingly simplistic method for decades. The candidates and political hopefuls of today must understand the importance of appearance if they are to ever become the leaders of tomorrow.  
