What your face says about how you’ll vote in the election
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Some people really do have Right-wing faces, scientists have suggested.
Square-jawed citizens are more likely to vote for conservative candidates, while those with a slender, impish face lean to the Left, according to a new study.
Stanford University has found that political beliefs can be determined based on inherent facial characteristics – and artificial intelligence (AI) can pick up on them.
Left-wingers tend to have smaller, lower faces, with lips and noses that are oriented further downward towards their chins when compared to conservatives, the research found.
Their chins are smaller than conservatives, who tend to have larger lower faces.
In 2019, Charles Moore, the Telegraph columnist and former editor, faced a backlash for claiming that Olivia Colman was unsuitable to portray the Queen in the Netflix series The Crown because she had “a distinctly Left-wing face”.
The suggestion provoked bemusement on Twitter, with the comedian David Baddiel describing it as “idiot columnist rhetoric” and Matt Lucas, the Little Britain actor, saying it did not make “the remotest sense”.
However, the new study suggests Moore may have had a point about the facial differences between the Left and the Right, even if Colman does not appear to fit neatly into either category based on her face shape.
For the study, researchers at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business asked 591 participants to complete a questionnaire about their political beliefs and have their portraits taken.
To avoid bias, researchers made sure participants removed all jewellery and makeup, and also asked them to shave facial hair and pull back their hair.
The AI algorithm was able to spot political orientations even though facial expression, grooming and head orientation were all the same.
Portraits were shown to human raters, who were also able to accurately assess where the participants fell on the political spectrum, simply based on face shape.
The results showed that the accuracy achieved by humans and the algorithm was comparable.
The AI model was also able to predict the political orientation of 3,401 politicians from the UK, the US and Canada.
‘More threatening than thought’
Researchers said the ability of an algorithm to correctly spot political allegiance was alarming.
Writing in the journal American Psychologist, they said: “Perhaps most crucially, our findings suggest that widespread biometric surveillance technologies are more threatening than previously thought.
“Our results, suggesting that stable facial features convey a substantial amount of the signal, imply that individuals have less control over their privacy.”
They added: “Even moderately accurate algorithms can have a tremendous impact when applied to large populations in high-stakes contexts. For example, even crude estimates of people’s character traits can significantly improve the efficiency of online mass persuasion campaigns.
“Scholars, the public, and policymakers should take notice and consider tightening policies regulating the recording and processing of facial images.”
Recent research has also shown that AI can correctly infer other traits, such as personality and sexual orientation.
Although some studies have suggested that algorithms could pick up on a person’s politics, it was thought they were doing so by looking at facial expressions, clothes, make-up, facial hair or hairstyles.
The new research is the first to show there is an innate political orientation of faces that is difficult to alter or hide.
Experts are unsure whether genetic traits that shape a person’s face are also linked to beliefs, or whether face shape itself triggers social effects which push voters in certain directions.
For example, researchers point out that people with larger jaws are often perceived as more socially dominant, a trait associated with political conservatism, and so over time might become so.
