Researchers found that conservative female politicians tend to appear happier and more attractive in pictures than liberal politicos, a new AI study has shown.
According to the study published in the Nature-owned journal Scientific Reports, the research said that AI can predict a person’s political ideology with 61 per cent accuracy by analysing just one headshot, reports New York Post.
The scientists used Microsoft Azure’s Face API tool to assess the emotional state of about 3,200 publicly submitted photos of political candidates who ran in the 2017 Danish municipal election.
According to the analysis, 80 per cent of the faces had a happy expression, while 19 per cent were neutral.
“For females (though not males), high attractiveness scores were found among those the model identified as likely to be conservative. These results are credible given that previous research using human raters has also highlighted a link between attractiveness and conservatism,” the researchers said.
Moreover, the study showed that the accuracy of facial recognition was even higher for men, at 65 per cent, before researchers removed all visual cues from the photos other than the men’s faces, such as shirt collars.
Left-leaning male politicians had more neutral, less happy expressions than their conservative counterparts, according to the study.
“Attractiveness was not the only correlate of model-predicted ideology. We also found that expressing happiness is associated with conservatism for both genders,” the researchers explained.
“Previous work has found smiling in photographs to be a valid indicator of extraversion, and while extraversion is not broadly associated with ideology some studies have found that right-wing politicians are more extraverted,” they added.
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