**** Elections thread *****

[spoonitnow]

I thought we were talking about exotic amazonian black women.

But if we're gonna go down the cable-news pundit bang-list, Kim Guilfoyle is at the extreme top of mine. Holy fucking shit I would suck her farts.

EDIT: Actually the whole FoxNews line up is drop dead sexy. I dare you to watch 'Outnumbered' without a boner.

Conservatives are more attractive, on average, than their liberal counterparts.

Conservatives really are better looking, research says

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.e95c61fb2d95

[BananaStand]

Conservatives are more attractive, on average, than their liberal counterparts.

Conservatives really are better looking, research says

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.e95c61fb2d95

I'm getting pretty fucking tired of you linking pay-walled content.

[spoonitnow]

I'm getting pretty fucking tired of you linking pay-walled content.

It doesn't show up like that for me. It might be my ad blocker or something.

Research has found that being attractive influences many things in a person’s life — their salary, their popularity and grades in school, even the prison sentences they receive. So why not their politics?

A recently published study in the Journal of Public Economics concludes that the attractiveness of a candidate does correlate with their politics. They find that politicians on the right are more good looking in Europe, the United States and Australia.

The study shows correlation, not causation, but the researchers float a simple economic explanation for why this might happen. Numerous studies have shown that good-looking people are likely to earn more, and that people who earn more are typically more opposed to redistributive policies, like the progressive taxes and welfare programs favored by the left.

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The researchers also offer a more general psychological explanation for the trend: That good-looking people are often treated better than others, and thus see the world as a more just place. Past studies have found that the more attractive people believe themselves to be, the lower their preference for egalitarianism, a value typically associated with the political left.

In their first experiment, the researchers showed respondents photographs of political candidates in Finnish municipal and parliamentary elections, members of the European Parliament, U.S. candidates for Senate and governor, and candidates for Australia’s House of Representatives. They asked participants to rate the photographs on a five-point scale. The results suggested that politicians on the right are more beautiful on all three continents.

In a separate experiment, the researchers analyzed elections in Finland. They say these elections are easier to study because most races feature multiple candidates competing for office — in contrast to races in the United States, which typically have just two major candidates.

The researchers found that Republican voters care more about appearance than Democratic voters do, but only if the voters don't have much information about the candidates and have to rely largely on appearance — in city-level elections, for example.

But in elections that give voters a lot of information – like parliamentary elections when candidates are well covered by TV news and in the newspaper – politicians' appearance matters equally to voters regardless of party or ideology.

In low-information city elections, a beauty increase of one standard deviation attracts about 20 percent more votes for the average candidate on the right and about 8 percent more votes for the average candidate on the left, the study finds. In high-information parliamentary elections, the figure is roughly 14 percent for candidates on both the left and right.

The researchers also suggest that voters correctly see candidates who are more good looking as more likely to be conservative. When voters don’t know much about candidates, they tend to use beauty as a cue for ideology.

[OngBonga]

I'm getting pretty fucking tired of you linking pay-walled content.

I didn't have a problem. Although I didn't read the article because I couldn't be fucked.

Of course Cons are more attractive that Libtards. People become libs because they have discovered that being a victim is a career. Of course, attractive people aren't victims because they tend to be popular, they don't get bullied at school and don't resent everyone else for being happy. So they just get on with their lives while allowing others to do the same. Libs wish to make everyone else feel as miserable and victimised as they feel..

[Poopadoop]

I didn't have a problem. Although I didn't read the article because I couldn't be fucked.

Of course Cons are more attractive that Libtards. People become libs because they have discovered that being a victim is a career. Of course, attractive people aren't victims because they tend to be popular, they don't get bullied at school and don't resent everyone else for being happy. So they just get on with their lives while allowing others to do the same. Libs wish to make everyone else feel as miserable and victimised as they feel..

A consideration of the validity and size of the effect, and how it was obtained, would be a good first step before theorizing on the whys and hows of what it means. Building a theoretical house of cards based on weak foundations is a scientifically bankrupt approach to model construction. I'm not saying this is or isn't a valid result, just that accepting it at face value is unwise.

I'm sure this will provoke a stream of google-searched "facts" from the resident expert on psychology, but just because this study has been published and reported in the media, that shouldn't be interpreted as evidence that their conclusion is well founded. There's a lot of questions that one should ask about a study before accepting its conclusions, not least of which relate to the sample size tested (larger samples are more likely to give 'significant' results; the size of the effect (is it large enough to have any real predictive power?); and the methods used (is it correlational or experimental - presumably the former which implies no cause-and-effect relationship among the variables).