The Politics of Beauty

How you perceive physical beauty depends on the politics of the person you’re looking at.

If the object of your gaze is of the same political party, you’re likely to find them more attractive than you would if their allegiance was to the other.

Stephen Nicholson, the lead author of a study in the journal Political Behavior, explains: “People are likely to see people from the other political party as less attractive, and we found that for both men and women.”

The study, titled “The Politics of Beauty: The Effects of Partisan Bias on Physical Attractiveness,” was conducted during the 2012 presidential campaign. Participants were shown pictures of individuals and supplied information about their presidential preference. When participants weren’t told who the person in the picture supported, there was no difference in how they were rated on the attractiveness scale. But that changed when their political leanings were revealed.

“Do I look like a president?
How handsome, am I, right?”
— Donald Trump, West Chester, Pa., April 25, 2016

“Results indicate that partisans, regardless of gender, rate target individuals as less attractive if they hold a dissimilar candidate preference,” according to an abstract of the research. “Female partisans, however, were more likely to rate target persons as more physically attractive when they held a similar candidate preference whereas no such effect was found for male partisans.”

The secret is in what’s called “ingroup favoritism.” That just means people in a cultural group have a tendency to regard members of that group more favorably than they do outsiders.

A political science professor at the University of California, Merced, Nicholson offers this interesting sidelight, based on opinion polling going back half a century: “One of the things we’ve found is that your liking toward your in-party has remained relatively constant. So people aren’t expressing more like or love for their own party today compared to 30, 40, 50 years ago. But people are expressing greater dislike for the out-party.”