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Notes -
CAN YOU RECOGNIZE LEFT-WINGERS FROM RIGHT-WINGERS FROM FACE ALONE?
I've seen numerous people on Twitter etc. claim that they can indeed do this, so I've created a quiz to test this claim. This quiz has 20 Finnish MP's essentially selected randomly (I took their photos from the Parliament's webpage, organized them alphabetically using medium icons and then just removed the middle part of this collage, leaving a bit over 20 photos: after removing the Swedish People's Party members for not fitting the ideological scale that well and taking one out for wearing a party pin, I was left with exactly 20 photos). Note: pics are displayed in randomized order.
The MP's represent six parties, but all you have to do here is select: Left or Right? Those representing the parties Social Democrats, Greens and Left Alliance are Left, those representing the parties Centre, National Coalition and The Finns are Right.
I will offer one hint: you cannot use tie color/dress color (ie. politicians wearing party-color dresses and ties) to make consistently correct guesses.
Missed opportunity for "Finnish" button.
10/20. (Tried to look only at the facial features). At that, I had near 100% mistake ratio in the beginning, and since your quiz provides instant feedback (IMO it shouldn't), I seem to have calibrated on the go for whatever signal there is in this data, instead of using any priors.
How extreme is your set, policy-wise? It is plausible that physiognomy doesn't work in reasonable (boring centrist) political systems. It can only work in principle when politics follow from some biological ground truth, and that implies divergence that begins far below the level of intelligent analysis and personal experience, the stuff of gut feelings, moral foundations and broad outlook – the product of gender, and hormones, and norms of reaction, crudely bundling together propositions that can well diverge under scrutiny. (Moreover, the absence of party choice crushes nuance and disincentivizes people with nuanced opinions from rising through the ranks).
In the US, a «left-winger» politician who can be robustly identified even without tribal dress or markings (to the extent that can be isolated) is someone like Lori Lightfoot or Scott Wiener; archetypal right-wingers are abundant in team Trump. Those are people far from the center of the Overton window, approaching street and campus combatants and appealing to the sentiment of such crowds. And in general, I think, American politics is more identitarian, racial, hormonal, biological than it should be in normal human societies.
Your set, meanwhile, looks like normie bureaucrats with some policy or platform differences, sorted into that line of work by common mechanisms that make white-collar people want to bother with governance.
For example, let's take your right-most party:
Those folks are, dare I say, National Socialists. Americans do not have National Socialists outside of jails and obscure extremist forums – they have high-T red-faced boors who advocate for generalized Pride In Our Team, and tax cuts for the rich (because Screw Them Parasites), and Religion, and generalized distrust of weirdoes and aliens and loquacious eggheads, and who like Strong Masculine Leaders Who Tell It Like It Is.
Biological methods work best in the realm of biological phenomena. Nothing new here.
...But I would like to test this hypothesis with American politicians. Can someone assemble, say, 40 of the less-known ones?
If this guy was a German, I would peg him as an FDP politician, a market liberal.
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