Carl L. Palmer

Halo Effects and the Attractiveness Premium in Perceptions of Political Expertise

Physical appearance, both our own and that of others, is a common influence on social interactions. In this article, we consider whether appearance also plays a role in how we come to understand politics. As a test, we use American National Election Study survey data, which includes the interviewer’s subjective ratings of respondents’ appearance and perceived political knowledge. We bolster the ANES results with a pair of survey experiments where subjects evaluated randomly assigned potential political discussion partners. Our results show that more attractive individuals are viewed as more knowledgeable and more persuasive, and are more likely to be sought out by others for political information. In addition, more attractive individuals (even the relatively uninformed) are more likely to report attempting to persuade others. These findings have implications for our understanding of how citizens identify political experts, the potential for the spread of misinformation, and the political judgments citizens make.

Caught in the crossfire: the competing influence of outcome and beneficiary cues on perceptions of antipoverty spending

ABSTRACT Certain issues in American politics have become racialized by virtue of elite rhetoric and media coverage. When considering these issues, many Americans find themselves, either consciously or unconsciously, relying on their sentiments toward and stereotypes of implicated groups to form opinions. This project seeks to extend research in this domain by considering the extent to which racialized thinking may be offset, or enhanced, due to the presence of other cues. While citizens typically support successful programs while opposing unsuccessful ones, do these patterns persist when program outcomes and sentiments toward program targets conflict? Results from a lab experiment and two survey experiments suggest that when while policy cues appear to have a strong and consistent impact on opinion, group stereotypes activated by group cues moderate the effect of policy cues.

Effects of physical attractiveness on political beliefs

Abstract. Physical attractiveness is an important social factor in our daily interactions. Scholars in social psychology provide evidence that attractiveness stereotypes and the “halo effect” are prominent in affecting the traits we attribute to others. However, the interest in attractiveness has not directly filtered down to questions of political behavior beyond candidates and elites. Utilizing measures of attractiveness across multiple surveys, we examine the relationship between attractiveness and political beliefs. Controlling for socioeconomic status, we find that more attractive individuals are more likely to report higher levels of political efficacy, identify as conservative, and identify as Republican. These findings suggest an additional mechanism for political socialization that has further implications for understanding how the body intertwines with the social nature of politics.

Political Socialization and Group-Centrism

The lasting impact of pre-adult experiences has been shown to affect a number of long-term political orientations, such as partisanship, issue opinions, and trust in government. In this project, I examine the effects of pre-adult experiences on perceptions of social groups, the persistence of those orientations over time, and the extent to which said orientations influence public opinion. Building from previous literature demonstrating the powerful effects group sentiment has on public opinion, this project seeks to determine the extent these orientations are developed in early adulthood, as opposed to over time. I test this expectation using the waves of the Political Socialization Study, examining the over-time relationship between youth perceptions of social groups, parental perceptions of groups, and opinion on issues arguably connected to those groups.

The Influence of Group and Outcome Cues on Perceptions of Governmental Spending

Previous research in issue framing has shown the importance of social groups in shaping opinion. When issues become tied to social groups through rhetoric, group sentiment becomes an important ingredient for opinion on associated issues. This project seeks to build upon such simple considerations of framing to examine the effect of group-implicating frame in conjunction with an additional component, the outcome. Results from an experiment embedded in a national survey suggest that, ignoring individual characteristics, outcomes are more important than beneficiaries when evaluating policy. When considering differences in individual sophistication however, we see that political knowledge serves as an important moderating factor for such frames, as well as individual dispositions. More sophisticated respondents, while still taking account of outcomes were also significantly more likely to differentiate between targeted groups. These findings have important implications for an understanding of how groups come to influence opinion through rhetoric, while raising a normative concern about the propensity for bias in issue opinion.