On politicians and job seekers

Today is Election Day and this morning I visited my polling precinct to cast my vote for various candidates for Durham City Council and Mayor of Durham. (When I moved over the summer, I didn’t change my registration and my “voting address” remains the same from when I lived at Alta Springs. I could never figure out why Alta Springs uses a Chapel Hill mailing address even though it’s technically part of Durham County.)

 

I have not followed the local political scene much over the past two years and mostly relied on some rather superficial methods upon which to choose my preferences. For the Durham City Council race, I based my choices (these are at-large districts where the top three vote getters win) on a visit to someone’s house last week. I was in the kitchen and saw a newspaper clipping on the refrigerator with a list of candidates. Three names were circled and those were the three (I voted for only two because I forgot the last one) I voted for today.

 

 

The Durham Mayoral race pit incumbent Bill Bell against challenger Thomas Stith. I knew next to nothing about the differences between the candidates and the newspaper clipping did not indicate a preference for this race. I therefore relied on an even more unorthodox methodology upon which to base my vote. While watching a news story on NBC 17 last night, I noticed that one man came across as much more competent than the other. It had little to do with what they were saying and much more to do with the way they looked, the way they came across, and the way they projected their confidence. I therefore decided that one man was more capable than the other and voted for him.

 

This reminded me of something I heard in the news two weeks ago about a research experiment that took place at Princeton University.

 

“To find the extent to which a candidate’s face predicted a winner, researchers exposed subjects to a pair of faces—one recently elected governor and the runner-up—for one-fourth of a second or less. They were then asked to pick the most competent candidate of the two people shown. If someone recognized a candidate, their results were excluded from the study.”

 

The study concluded that in many cases, the more competent looking candidate was more likely to win.

 

“Subjects picked the elected governor over the runner-up as the most competent one about 64 percent of the time, a result that significantly exceeded random chance of 50 percent. When the two candidates shown were of the same ethnicity and sex, the results were even more predictive of a winner.”

 

It goes to show that it when you are seeking a job, it pays to look confident. This applies to conventional job seekers on an interview as well as political job seekers appearing on television.