John Sides has an excellent discussion of a recent article by Jeremy Bailensen, Shanto Iyengar, Nick Yee, and Nathan Collins, who find that survey respondents are slightly more likely to have positive feelings about a candidate if they are shown a picture of the candidate that has been “morphed” to look more like the respondent him or herself.
Sides discusses how and when these effects might actually be important. As he puts it, “to broaden their results from the impact of facial similarity to that of physical appearance more generally: if ‘faces matter,’ they are likely to matter more in precisely the kinds of races where, ironically, voters are less likely even to know what the candidates look like in the first place.”
To me, the most interesting implications involve ethnic and racial politics. I hope the Bailensen et al. results get lots of attention from perspectives similar to Sides, where the value of the study is recognized without it being presented with a spin of: “voters are silly and only care about appearances.”
Hmm… The pictures on the right don't look like a 65-35 blend. More like 95-5 or so. I guess it's 65-35, conditional on fixing the hair and the shape of the face?
Looking at the pictures in the article, the politicians are old and the subjects are young. So the main effect of the morphs is to smooth out the lines in the politicians' faces and make them look younger. In your top example, the picture of Clinton is also terribly lit and makes her look pale white, so the morph also adds some much-needed color to her skin.
Of course, it would be easy to test the claim of "any morph is better, not just a morph towards my face". Just show participants a randomized morph.
I echo the "any morph is better" thought. <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=k5n&q=%22average+faces%22+attractive&btnG=Search" rel="nofollow">Google suggests we will like any combination more than any particular person.
I realize I'm commenting late on this (I just discovered your wonderful blog), but I did read that article in POQ and one thing I didnt see was if older people would have the same result.
Since most of the survey respondents were college students, the blends just seemed to make the candidates look younger, which I suspect many people might respond to favorably.