Too Pretty for Politics

If Sarah Palin is looking for something to tell herself at night, to help ease the guilt of the damage she caused to her own party’s presidential ticket as she tries to go to sleep, here’s one she might test out: I’m too dang pretty.

No, it wouldn’t just be self-delusion. It’d be science.

A study just out in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, claims that the more people focused on Palin’s sexual attractiveness, the less likely they were to rate her as competent.

Tom Jacobs summarizes the experiment, conducted by psychologists Nathan Heflick and Jamie Goldenberg of the University of South Florida:

They took a group of 133 undergraduates and assigned them to write a few lines about one of two celebrities: Palin or actress Angelina Jolie. Half of the participants in each category were asked to write “your thoughts and feelings about this person,” while the other half were asked to write “your thoughts and feelings about this person’s appearance.”

The participants were then asked to rate their subject (Palin or Jolie) in terms of various attributes, including competence. Finally, they were asked who they intended to vote for in the upcoming election.

Those who wrote about Palin’s appearance were more positive in their assessments than those who assessed her qualities as a person, but they rated her far lower in terms of competence, intelligence and capability, and were far less likely to indicate they planned to vote for the McCain-Palin ticket.

In feminist terms, the authors say, the students focusing on her attractiveness “objectified” her. And not just because they were men; women outnumbered men significantly in the study.

Now, of course, we all have our own opinions and intuitions on this. I think she’s very attractive (as a Tina Fey enthusiast, I guess that’s inevitable). And I think she’s terribly incompetent — or, at least, woefully underqualified for the position to which she aspired. So, I fit the model. But plenty of people thought she was unattractive and incompetent; and plenty of Republicans seemed to think she was pretty and competent.

As often, this is a question of degree and marginal effect. A committed Republican, predisposed to liking his or her party’s vice-presidential candidate, might not be dissuaded by her prettiness. But maybe he or she thinks just a tiny bit less of her intelligence because of it. Meanwhile, a true swing voter might be pushed over the line, from McCain-Palin to Obama-Biden. (But, hey, Biden’s a handsome devil — maybe there’s a comparable effect with men. You didn’t see Mitt Romney at the top of the Republican ticket.)

Is there any practical advice to be drawn from this? I’ll leave the last word to Andrew Malcolm at the Los Angeles Times: “for any hope of success in 2012 or beyond, the 45-year-old governor needs to whack off that hair, pork up a bit and get some cheap, baggy pantsuits over at the Wasilla Wal-Mart. And instead of that come-on wink that many thought they liked, she’d do well to develop an uncontrollable facial twitch.”

HT: Political Wire

photo credit: eskimojoe