AI Can Tell Your Political Affiliation Just by Looking at Your Face, Researchers Find

Now, this is a little spooky if confirmed! Time to wear masks! 😊

"A study recently published in the peer-reviewed American Psychologist journal claims that a combination of facial recognition and artificial intelligence technology can accurately assess a person’s political orientation by simply looking at that person’s blank, expressionless face. ..."

From the abstract:

"Carefully standardized facial images of 591 participants were taken in the laboratory while controlling for self-presentation, facial expression, head orientation, and image properties. They were presented to human raters and a facial recognition algorithm: both humans (r = .21) and the algorithm (r = .22) could predict participants’ scores on a political orientation scale (Cronbach’s α = .94) decorrelated with age, gender, and ethnicity. These effects are on par with how well job interviews predict job success, or alcohol drives aggressiveness. The algorithm’s predictive accuracy was even higher (r = .31) when it leveraged information on participants’ age, gender, and ethnicity. Moreover, the associations between facial appearance and political orientation seem to generalize beyond our sample: The predictive model derived from standardized images (while controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity) could predict political orientation (r ≈ .13) from naturalistic images of 3,401 politicians from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The analysis of facial features associated with political orientation revealed that conservatives tended to have larger lower faces. The predictability of political orientation from standardized images has critical implications for privacy, the regulation of facial recognition technology, and understanding the origins and consequences of political orientation."

AI Can Tell Your Political Affiliation Just by Looking at Your Face, Researchers Find

Facial Recognition Technology and Human Raters Can Predict Political Orientation From Images of Expressionless Faces Even When Controlling for Demographics and Self-Presentation (open access)

Credits: The Gradient (weekly newsletter)

Figure 1. Three Causal Pathways Linking Facial Features and Political OrientationNote. The facial image was used with permission.