Elected in 100 milliseconds: Appearance-based trait inferences and voting

Item does not contain fulltextRecent research has shown that rapid judgments about the personality traits of political candidates, based solely on their appearance, can predict their electoral success. This suggests that voters rely heavily on appearances when choosing which candidate to elect. Here we review this literature and examine the determinants of the relationship between appearance-based trait inferences and voting. We also reanalyze previous data to show that facial competence is a highly robust and specific predictor of political preferences. Finally, we introduce a computer model of face-based competence judgments, which we use to derive some of the facial features associated with these judgments.28 p

Robot pressure : the impact of robot eye gaze and lifelike bodily movements upon decision-making and trust

Between people, eye gaze and other forms of nonverbal communication can influence trust. We hypothesised similar effects would occur during human-robot interaction, predicting a humanoid robot’s eye gaze and lifelike bodily movements (eye tracking movements and simulated “breathing”) would increase participants’ likelihood of seeking and trusting the robot’s opinion in a cooperative visual tracking task. However, we instead found significant interactions between robot gaze and task difficulty, indicating that robot gaze had a positive impact upon trust for difficult decisions and a negative impact for easier decisions. Furthermore, a significant effect of robot gaze was found on task performance, with gaze improving participants’ performance on easy trials but hindering performance on difficult trials. Participants also responded significantly faster when the robot looked at them. Results suggest that robot gaze exerts “pressure” upon participants, causing audience effects similar to social facilitation and inhibition. Lifelike bodily movements had no significant effect upon participant behaviour

De Pulchritudine non est Disputandum? A cross-cultural investigation of the alleged intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgment

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences\u2014rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross-cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general