What’s in a Face?: The Effect of Partial Facial Occlusion on Judgments of Political Competence

Abstract

This paper reports on a study that examines the relationship between participants’ facial-traitbased judgments of competence for politicians and the real election outcomes for the corresponding political races using facial occlusion techniques. It discusses pre-existing literature on face-based trait judgments. It examines whether there are discrepancies in trends between gubernatorial and Senate races and House races. It also examines the extent to which different parts of a candidate headshot motivate competence judgments, including the relationships between masks that reveal some facial information and masks that reveal all possible facial information, and the extent to which non-facial information affects judgments of competence. It concludes with a review of possible sources of error and opportunities for future research.