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 As the inaugural study in the Washington Post-Political Communication Lab collaboration, we studied attraction to familiar faces. A considerable body of research in social psychology derived from the classic studies of Stanford psychologist Robert Zajonc demonstrates that people evaluate objects they have encountered previously more favorably than novel objects, even when they do not consciously recognize the previously-encountered objects. In other words, "mere exposure" is sufficient to increase an object's likeability.
We are interested in the question because in the political arena, there is ample evidence of a familiarity bias in voting behavior. The fact that incumbents habitually win re-election by convincing margins may be attributable, in part, to the higher level of recognition of the incumbent's name and face. We used digital face morphing technology to create relatively familiar and unfamiliar faces. More than 2,200 individuals participated in the study, a part of an ongoing collaborative effort by Stanford researchers Jeremy Bailenson, Nathan Collins, Shanto Iyengar, and Nick Yee. What's in a Face?
Testing the Familiarity-Likeability Connection
By Shanto Iyengar and Richard Morin
Sunday, February 26, 2006; 5:04 PM
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