Conservative women are perceived as both prettier and happier than left-wing women, at least according to artificial intelligence (AI).
An AI model gave conservative women high “attractiveness” scores, according to a March study published in the journal Scientific Reports, which is owned by Nature.
“For females (though not males), high attractiveness scores were found among those the model identified as likely to be conservative,” the study said.
The researchers added that these results are “credible” since previous research using human raters rather than AI has also highlighted a link between attractiveness and conservatism. The researchers also observed that an expression of “contempt” was related to “a predicted probability of left-wing ideology.”
“We also found that expressing happiness is associated with conservatism for both genders,” the researchers wrote.
The researchers said the happiness correlation may be due to right-wing politicians being more extraverted, as previous research as suggested, or attractiveness being more important to conservatives. Either way, more research is needed on the correlation between happy faces and conservatism, they said.
The researchers also created “facial composites,” or AI-created faces made by combining photos. They did this for both men and women.
“Most clearly we see that both male and female right-wing composites appeared happier than their left-wing counterparts. … The right-wing faces, particularly for females, might be perceived as more attractive,” the study said.
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The researchers, three psychologists and political scientists from Denmark and Sweden, used a type of AI called “deep learning” to predict a person’s ideology using a photo of their face.
“The question of whether facial photographs can predict whether someone is leftist or rightist is well answered in the affirmative,” the researchers wrote. “We thus instead explore why those predictions are possible.”
The study used the headshots of 3,233 Danish political candidates who ran for local office in the 2017 Danish Municipal election. Danish municipal elections are much less polarized than high-stakes, competitive elections, and Danish political scientists describe municipal candidates as the “last amateurs in politics,” the researchers noted.
Face API from Microsoft Azure’s Cognitive Services was the AI used to analyze the faces. The AI correctly predicted the political leanings of both men and women 61% of the time, based on just one photo of the person’s face. One of the points of the study was to show how easily AI can identify personal information such as ideology, which raises concerns about privacy.
“Our results confirmed the threat to privacy posed by deep learning approaches,” the researchers wrote.
Another study from 2017 appears to support the researchers’ findings. Right-leaning politicians are more attractive in Europe, the United States, and Australia, a study published in the Journal of Public Economics found. The researchers in that study suggested that good-looking people are more likely to make more money and are also more likely to oppose progressive tax policies and welfare programs.
A 2022 survey found that conservative women are much more likely to be “completely satisfied” with their lives than liberal women. About 31% of conservative women ages 18 to 55 are “completely satisfied” with their lives while only 16% of liberal women are, according to the American Family Survey from YouGov and Deseret News. The survey also found that conservative women are 24% more likely to be happy with their family life.