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Attractive, happy women more likely ‘right-wing’, while faces on the left show ‘contempt’, new study finds

June 22, 2023 | | Print Article

Mirror mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all — conservative or liberal women? The answer, according to the science, is conservative women.

“A new study in Denmark used machine learning techniques on photographs of faces of Danish politicians to predict whether their political ideology is left- or right-wing. The accuracy of predictions was 61%,” PsyPost.org, an independent news outlet, reported late last month.

“Faces of right-wing politicians were more likely to have happy and less likely to have neutral facial expressions. Women with attractive faces were more likely to be right-wing, while women whose faces showed contempt were more likely to be left-wing,” the outlet added.

So says The Science™:

The results came as no surprise to conservatives.

“Well, duh!” famous left-wing attorney Harmeet Dhillon pithily tweeted.

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Why no surprise?

For one, most liberal Democrats don’t even know what a woman is to begin with. Moreover, God knows how many liberal Democrat women are real women versus so-called “transgender women.”

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Also, some things are just obvious.

This is not the first study to find that conservatives are more attractive, nor will it likely be the last.

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“A recently published study in the Journal of Public Economics concludes that the attractiveness of a candidate does correlate with their politics. They find that politicians on the right are more good looking in Europe, the United States and Australia,” The Washington Post reported in January of 2017.

“The study shows correlation, not causation, but the researchers float a simple economic explanation for why this might happen. Numerous studies have shown that good-looking people are likely to earn more, and that people who earn more are typically more opposed to redistributive policies, like the progressive taxes and welfare programs favored by the left,” the Post added.

But what were to happen if socioeconomic status was controlled? Glad you asked, because another study published in the same journal exactly a year later answered this very question.

“Now an American study published in the Journal of Public Economics based on comparing multiple surveys has concluded that the attractiveness of a person can correlate with their political beliefs,” The Guardian reported at the time.

“The authors, Rolfe Daus Peterson of Susquehanna University and Carl L Palmer of Illinois State University wrote: ‘Controlling for socioeconomic status, we found that more attractive individuals are more likely to report higher levels of political efficacy, identify as conservative and identify as Republican,'” according to The Guardian.

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Well, there you have it …

Of course, looks aren’t everything, right? And so what about other factors like, say, happiness — who’s happier, conservatives or liberals?

Well, one study out of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Department of Epidemiology released back in December found that teenagers who identify as liberal are more likely to be unhappy than those who identify as conservative.

“According to the report, female adolescents are more likely to be liberal than male adolescents. And liberal girls are the most prone to depression. How prone? Between 2010 and 2018, they noted, symptoms of depression rose by more than 50% for ‘female liberals,'” researcher and essayist John Mac Ghlionn reported for the New York Post.

Another study, this one published last month in “Current Psychology,” found that individuals who are prone to “left-wing authoritarianism” (LWA) — i.e., people who are leftists — display “higher levels of narcissism” and psychopathic traits and are more likely to endorse “antihierarchical aggression” and “top-down censorship.”

“The top-down censorship dimension of LWA is described as the preference for the use of authority (governmental and institutional) to deal with opposition and the strive to suppress any speech that is considered as offensive and intolerant,” the study read.

“For example, individuals with high levels of top-down censorship may strive to suppress free speech to regulate the expression of right-wing beliefs in educational institutions,” it continued.

Surprised?

Vivek Saxena
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