This is insane: New research suggests that monkeys can accurately predict U.S. election outcomes. According to a fascinating preprint by researchers Yaoguang Jiang, Annamarie Huttunen, Naz Belkaya, and Michael Platt, our furry primate cousins have an uncanny knack for forecasting which candidates will win, simply by looking at their faces.
As the authors explain,
How people vote often defies rational explanation. Physical traits sometimes sway voters more than policies do – but why? Here we show that rhesus macaques, who have no knowledge about political candidates or their policies, implicitly predict the outcomes of U.S. gubernatorial and senatorial elections based solely on visual features. Given a pair of candidate photos, monkeys spent more time looking at the loser than the winner, and this gaze bias predicted not only binary election outcomes but also the candidates’ vote share.
The key findings are shown in this graph.
Why do monkeys look for longer at losers than winners? Jiang and team argue that it’s because winners tend to be more facially masculine, and monkeys have a built-in tendency to avoid staring too long at masculine faces. In monkey communities, sustained eye contact represents a direct monkey challenge. Monkeys therefore limit the time they spend looking at dominant or masculine individuals, to avoid incurring their wrath.
The fact, however, that monkey eye-contact patterns predict human voting patterns suggests that humans, like their monkey counterparts, are responsive to facial masculinity – and not only that we’re responsive to it, but that it affects the way we vote.
“Our findings,” note Jiang and colleagues, “endorse the idea that voters spontaneously respond to evolutionarily conserved visual cues to physical prowess and that voting behavior is shaped, in part, by ancestral adaptations shared with nonhuman primates.”
Of course, voting patterns aren’t just a product of facial masculinity. As the researchers point out,
Based solely on facial masculinity cues, female candidates are projected to lose most races. Yet voters chose the female candidate about half the time (overall female winning probability = 48.8% in our sample), indicating other factors besides facial masculinity contribute to voting decisions.
Still, facial masculinity does seem to be an important contributor.
This doesn’t seem an ideal situation. Ideally, we’d be voting for rational reasons, not monkey-based reasons. Jiang and colleagues’ findings therefore highlight “the imperative for voters to overcome this ancient heuristic by becoming more informed on candidates and their policies.”
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