I’m sure you already knew this, but now, science confirms it. According to a recent study conducted in Denmark, conservative women are more attractive than liberal women. Danish researchers utilized an artificial intelligence model to examine the attractiveness and happiness levels of conservative and liberal female politicians in photographs, and conservative female politicians were perceived as more attractive and exhibited greater happiness in the analyzed photos compared to their liberal counterparts.
“Approximately 3,200 publicly submitted photos of political candidates who ran in the 2017 Danish municipal election were used in the study,” reports Newsmax. “The researchers inputted the photos into Microsoft Azure’s Face API tool to evaluate the person’s emotional state, with 80% of the faces analyzed read as happy and 19% read as neutral.”
“For females (though not males), high attractiveness scores were found among those the model identified as likely to be conservative,” the study concludes. “These results are credible, given that previous research using human raters has also highlighted a link between attractiveness and conservatism.”
The study similarly found that left-leaning politicians appeared less happy than conservative politicians.
“Attractiveness was not the only correlate of model-predicted ideology,” the scientists explained. “We also found that expressing happiness is associated with conservatism for both genders. Previous work has found smiling in photographs to be a valid indicator of extraversion, and while extraversion is not broadly associated with ideology, some studies have found that right-wing politicians are more extraverted.”
The scientist argued that because attractiveness can help boost a politician’s electoral success, “all candidates are incentivized to provide an attractive photograph.”
Related: Young Liberals Are Miserable. Gee, I Wonder Why.
“Politicians on the left and right may have different incentives for smiling — for example, smiling faces have been found to look more attractive, which is comparatively important for conservative politicians,” the paper explains, though the scientists argue that further research is needed to determine “the extent to which happy faces are indicative of conservatism outside of samples of politicians.”
Previous studies have shown that politically conservative people are generally happier than their liberal counterparts, and frankly, it’s not rocket science to understand how this is possible. Conservatives typically uphold traditional values, prioritize community engagement, embrace religious beliefs, support marriage, emphasize personal responsibility and self-reliance, and advocate for individual rights and freedoms.
These aspects contribute to the establishment of social order, a sense of purpose, and stability, which can positively impact overall happiness. As for liberals, well… have you ever known a liberal that wasn’t generally miserable? How can you not be when you never take personal responsibility and also assume you’re a victim?
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