Researcher’s at Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School predicted in August 2007 year that John McCain would win the Republican nomination for the race to the White house this year – and they were right?

Rather han engaging in political analysis, the researchers took the much more obvious route of asking New Zealand schoolgirls who was the hottest option.

Dr Green, a Wellington-based senior research fellow in the business and economic forecasting unit at Melbourne’s Monash University, said a Princeton University professor, Alexander Todorov, found that snap judgments of competence, based on a quick look at pictures of candidates’ faces, had done a good job of predicting the winners of congressional and senate races.

With Professor Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School and colleagues Professors Randall Jones in the US, and Malcolm Wright in Australia, Dr Green extended this research to US presidential primaries.

….

The researchers provided no other information to the people they surveyed than colour photographs of the candidates. They deliberately asked people with little knowledge of the candidates: university students in Australia and New Zealand and high school girls in New Zealand.

It’s perfectly understandable. He’s so dreamy.

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