Politicans Who Look Like Babies Might Not Stop Us From Getting Killed
Our Nation's Founding Baby
You know and I know that grown adults that look like babies are always hilarious. But according to studies (studies! science!), looking like a huge baby is a disadvantage, if you’d like to win an election of some kind. Politicans with round heads and big eyes lost 70% of the time! But leave it to the Finns to ruin our out-of-context too-narrow statistical pop science fun.
Baby Geniuses
Researchers at the University of Helsinki wanted to test this for themselves. And it turns out that yes, looking like a giant baby does initially make people perceive you as less competent than someone who looks like a serious, craggy old man. But it is not a good indicator of electoral results.
Incompetent, sleepy.
Recent research has documented that competent-looking political candidates do better in U.S. elections and that babyfaced individuals are generally perceived to be less competent than maturefaced individuals. Taken together, this suggests that babyfaced political candidates are perceived as less competent and therefore fare worse in elections. We test this hypothesis, making use of photograph-based judgments by 2,772 respondents of the facial appearance of 1,785 Finnish political candidates. Our results confirm that babyfacedness is negatively related to inferred competence in politics. Despite this, babyfacedness is either unrelated or positively related to electoral success, depending on the sample of candidates.
We have to stop elected giant babies, everyone. They are less competent! Look at the Cowboys under Wade Phillips for godssake!
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But how do we account for Kenneth Edmonds’ inexplicable success on the 1990s R&B charts?
all i can say is love makes things happen.
In response to another comment. See in context »How dare you call dear Winnie incompetent and sleepy. He was extremely competent; positively adequate if you must. And drunk, not sleepy. Winston Churchill is the greatest baby-headed leader in the history of the western world! However, he assumed office in 1940 rather than winning an election. And he did lose the very next election right after leading the UK, alone, to victory, with almost no help from those ‘fraidy cat Russians (30 million dead, bah!) let alone the isolationist, know-nothing Americans. So maybe there is something to this unelectability of the fetus-craniumed.