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Findings

March 4, 2009

Sex Appeal May Have Hurt Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin’s attractiveness may indeed have affected the 2008 presidential race — by making voters less likely to support the GOP ticket.

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In a Sept. 4, 2008 column, just after Sarah Palin accepted the Republican nomination for vice-president, Will Wilkinson wrote admiringly of her “sexual power,” adding: “I think she is a tremendously sexy woman. How this will affect the race, I have no idea, but it’s just got to.”

New research suggests the Cato Institute research fellow was right. The Alaska governor’s attractiveness may indeed have affected the race — by making voters less likely to support the GOP ticket.

In a paper just published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, psychologists Nathan Heflick and Jamie Goldenberg of the University of South Florida describe an experiment they conducted shortly after Wilkinson wrote those words. Building upon 1980s research suggesting attractive women in high-status jobs are perceived as less competent (a finding that has been challenged in recent years), they examined whether Palin’s sex appeal — the subject of endless media chatter in the weeks after she joined the ticket — hindered her ability to make the case she was up for the job.

They took a group of 133 undergraduates and assigned them to write a few lines about one of two celebrities: Palin or actress Angelina Jolie. Half of the participants in each category were asked to write “your thoughts and feelings about this person,” while the other half were asked to write “your thoughts and feelings about this person’s appearance.”

The participants were then asked to rate their subject (Palin or Jolie) in terms of various attributes, including competence. Finally, they were asked who they intended to vote for in the upcoming election.

Those who wrote about Palin’s appearance were more positive in their assessments than those who assessed her qualities as a person, but they rated her far lower in terms of competence, intelligence and capability, and were far less likely to indicate they planned to vote for the McCain-Palin ticket.

“It wasn’t her appearance per se” that soured people on Palin, Heflick said in an interview. “It was the effect her appearance had on their perception of her competence and humanity. Those variables made people less likely to vote for her.” (Not surprisingly, the participants’ feelings about Jolie did not influence their political opinions, whether they focused on her looks or personality.)

Heflick noted that all the self-proclaimed Democrats participating in the exercise indicated they were voting for Obama. So at least in this sample, it was Republicans and independents who were internally debating Palin’s suitability for the job. The study suggests that their confidence in her abilities may have decreased the more they focused on her looks — and thus, in feminist terms, objectified her.

There’s no question that, in the early weeks of the campaign, Palin’s attractiveness was a subject of intense fascination in the media. Even today, the Web site of GQ magazine refers to the Alaska governor as “the cougar in chief,” commenting, “She’s here, she’s built, and she’s not wearing any goddamn old-lady-senator suits, either.” (Take that, Hillary Clinton.)

On the other hand, Palin had no problem sowing doubts about her suitability for the job. She hardly demonstrated a grasp of the issues, and was far from fast on her feet during interviews.

Heflick is quick to admit that people cast their votes for a wide variety of reasons, and it’s impossible to say whether her looks truly swayed voters. Nevertheless, he finds the study’s results troubling, in that they suggest being seen as sexually attractive may impact a woman’s “real-world chances of success.”

What’s more, this dynamic isn’t due solely to the one-track mind of males: The study group was dominated by women, with 96 taking part along with 37 men.

So did the Republican Party make a mistake in heightening Palin’s attractiveness by buying her all those beautiful outfits (a controversy that didn’t break out until after Heflick and Goldenberg completed their experiment)? Perhaps so. Americans have come to accept the idea of a female president, but we may not quite be ready for a sex-symbol-in-chief.

* Authors of the study — Jamie Goldenberg and Nathan Heflick — react to having their work misinterpreted in the mainstream media. See the story here.

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  • Jacobson Sandra

    As a 55-yr old white woman who is an ardent supporter of Obama, the first sight of Palin as VP choice was scary. I assumed competence and saw her attractiveness as the counter to Obama’s, especially with the well-delivered convention speech. I saw her addition to the ticket as a real threat to Obama. Then she started displaying her incompetence, and it became clear to most people with brains (the large ones, not the little ones)that she could easily ruin the country with her lack of a grasp of basic concepts. We had enough of Cheney being the real power of the country, partly because of Bush’s intellectual lack of prowess. Palin was dumb—and vindictive. I am thankful every day that McCain and Palin failed to win the election. If Obama is having a hard time, they would have already killed the country.

    • lee tabin

      Palin actually governed from the center and part of her "stumbles" were caused by the editing of Gibson's interview with her which you can google. Her problem was that she had an R after her name. Obama made and makes gaffe after gaffe and Biden is the king of Gaffes but the media seems to ignore them.

      Palin was the youngest and most popular governor in the country when she was chosen. How dumb could she have been?

      All the data I have seen but this shows she helped the happless Rino, McCain, and he needed help with both his presentation and his views. She is so stupid she is making a million dollars a month.

  • peter o’keefe

    Don’t be ridiculous.Good looks never hurt anybody.Especially those who are seeking approval.

  • seee kee

    I agree completely with Ms Jacobson. When Palin burst on the national scene with her strongly delivered (yet divisive) convention speech, it scared the crap out of me because it seemed obvious at the time that someone with her speaking skills (combined with her polished made-for-TV look) could really help McCain win. Only when she stumbled on the subsequent TV interviews and put her stunning lack of political and cultural knowledge on full display did the momentum in her favor die down. It had nothing to do with her looks, as much as Palin herself probably wants to believe it did. It was simply obvious that she was dangerously unqualified for the job and the Republicans didn’t manage to fool the people this time.

  • Deborah Rioux

    While looks never hurt anyone this time around lack of basic knowledge did. For many American’s having such an incompetant human being anywhere near the presidency seemed not only bad decison making on the part of The Republicans, but showed a lack of leadership ability on the part of Sen. McCain. It also didn’t help her cause that when she crashed and burned in interviews she played the blame game refusing to take responsibility for her stunning lack of knowledge.

  • Jim Jungle

    Sarah displayed far better knowledge of the issues than 0bama or Biden ever did. As for the interview with Katie Couric, it was designed specifically to trip her up. 0bama never had anything but softball interviews from his acolytes in the media that were designed to make him look good.The only time anyone ever asked 0bama a hardball question during the campaign came from Joe the Plumber. 0bama was clearly flustered by the question and had his worshippers in the Ohio state government investigate Joe in order to try to find some skeletons in his closet.Sarah came to prominence in Alaska by fighting against corruption in her own party. 0bama’s party in Illinois has much bigger problems with corruption but Barack did absolutely nothing to try to fight it. Instead, he rode that decadent machine all the way to the white house. He endorsed Blagojevich for governor and took bribes from Tony Rezko.

  • keith eddy

    In the 80′s (and still today) the press referred to Reagan as an imbacle, a tottering old actor. I would hope people who feel that way would read a book of Reagan’s letters. This was a focued, intelligent man. My point is this, the media will always try to portray their opponents as “idiots”. These are the same people who find Obama so inspiring, probably because of quotes like this:”"In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.” –on a Kansas tornado that killed 12 people”Wow…

  • keith eddy

    In the 80′s (and still today) the press referred to Reagan as an imbacle, a tottering old actor. I would hope people who feel that way would read a book of Reagan’s letters. This was a focued, intelligent man. My point is this, the media will always try to portray their opponents as “idiots”. These are the same people who find Obama so inspiring, probably because of quotes like this:”"In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.” –on a Kansas tornado that killed 12 people”Wow…

  • keith eddy

    In the 80′s (and still today) the press referred to Reagan as an imbacle, a tottering old actor. I would hope people who feel that way would read a book of Reagan’s letters. This was a focued, intelligent man. My point is this, the media will always try to portray their opponents as “idiots”. These are the same people who find Obama so inspiring, probably because of quotes like this:”"In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.” –on a Kansas tornado that killed 12 people”Wow…

  • doe john

    They talked about this study on the O’Reilly Show last night:…………………………..>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsaU01Yu1lU

  • amy coulter

    Makes sense to me! I totally get the study. I have read a lot about it. All in all most people are way off, like Bill O’Reilly. I watched his show last night and they talked about this study by Nathan Heflick and Jamie Goldenberg. They interviewed Jamie she seemed like she was trying to explain the study but O’Reilly kept cutting her off. Very interesting never the less.

  • amy coulter

    Oh, I wanted to say how glad I am that this is where the story broke….Well done writer.

  • marcy robinson

    God! Please drop the issue of Palin’s looks! I am from Alaska and have seen her in person more than once! She isn’t that great! It is amazing what 50K of makeup artists can do for you! cases in point, JLO, cameron diaz, jen aniston, etc. Just average until the lights and makeup transform them! Palin is OK. No more, no less. She is a narcissist and will continue to seek the spotlight until we let her just go away! Why do you keep this going? Meanwhile, 109 beautiful wolves have been slaughtered since the new year! THAT is the face of Sarah Palin. When it comes to beauty between her and the wolves, there is just no comparison, she loses

  • terry holmes

    These are media studies, actually. The number of articles devoted to how she looked, her clothes, etc., Journalism utilizes the basic tools of sociology for media stories.It is, of course, soft.But it still is legitimate

  • dawn handle

    I have a very beautiful (voluptuous and blonde) daughter who feels she is initially underestimated. When she is unattached, she dyes her hair so she will be less attractive to men who prowl for dumb blondes. I understand the point that the psychologists were trying to illustrate.

  • dawn handle

    I sort of feel bad for Palin….But she brought it on her self.

  • bell jon

    What an interesting study….Thank you so much for sharing.

  • keeps laura

    Wow, what an uproar this study has recieved. It is almost hard to take in. All in all I have seen some really crap reporting. I am glad we can count on miller-mccune for the facts.

  • johnson jerry

    I could not agree with you more Laura. The first artical I read was on aol.com I then came here and what a differance in findings. The media is a cruel world.

  • sara login

    Jerry and Laura….I was just thinking the same thing. I was also wandering how the researchers must be feeling about some of the media’s reaction. I wouldn’t be very happy that is for sure! I have seen Heflick comment on some of the articals trying to explain the true findings… Poor guys.

  • jenny jenny

    I think I am going to subscribing to this magazine. Does anyone else receive the actual magazine? I was wondering how much stuff from there web site is in the actual magazine. I hope this article is in the magazine. You see I go to school at USF and Nathan Heflick was my instructor for Intro to Psychology…Oh, and he was awesome! Also, I have a few friends that had Jamie Goldenberg for their Intro to Psychology class and they all raved about what an outstanding teacher she was. Anyway, many many of us here at USF want to possibly subscribe to the magazine.

  • Art Robles

    The negative reactions your are getting, Professors Heflick and Goldenberg, have more to do with the faults of your study than with the findings. There are so many flaws in this study that the findings have to be invalidated.The fact that your study involved mostly Democrats is not irrelevent. They already knew who Governor Palin was and more than likely already formed a negative opinion of her, based likely on the negative opinions that the mainstream press and liberal political blogs had expressed by then. I’m assuming many of the subjects were young college students. It is obvious that young people today worship attractive Hollywood celebrities. Therefore, it is not surprising that Miss Jolie received such high ratings.This study does not have a control group. That is one of the most fundamental features of a good study. This one has none. What can you compare these findings to? A better study would’ve involved asking the subjects to rate the competence of a fictional candidate for a fictional office, thereby eliminated notoriety of a celebrity as a possible source of bias. No mention should be made of political party affiliation, again to eliminate that bias. A control group and an experimental group should be given a list of qualifications and a summary of the candidate that is the same for both groups. They would be comparing apples to apples, not apples to oranges, as this South Florida study did (it makes no sense to compare a politician to an actor). The control group would be given a photo of a woman previously deemed in a separate study to be neutral, neither particularly pretty or homely. The experimental group would see the photo of the attractive woman. The photo would be the only difference–that is called the independent variable. They difference in responses–if there is one–would be the dependent variable.Standard, basic stuff. I’m surprised that two university professors designed such a faulty study. I teach psychology in high school. I have my students design studies at the beginning of the semester. The design by the South Florida professors would’ve gotten a D from me. I would have had the students makes significant changes to it before actually conducting the study.I believe that the professors hypothesis may be correct, but this study was so poorly done. It lacks vailidity, since it doesn’t measure what it intends to measure. It lacks reliability. Give this study to a different group and you may end up with widely different results.

  • heflick nathan

    Art:Did you read our reply to the media’s miscoverage of this study? If you have, and still reach these conclusions, then I don’t know what to say.As we have written countless times, the study had NOTHING to do with comparing Jolie to Palin. It had to do with the effects of focusing on a woman’s appearance (compared to her personality) on how people percieve her. We used Palin and Jolie because they are women who people know enough to write about and rate.You write that we didn’t have a control group, which is absurd. We randomly assigned people to one of four groups (Palin personality, palin appearance, Jolie personalty, Jolie appearance). They wrote about whichever topic they were assigned to. The study was comparing the appearance focused participants to the personality focused participants.I hope this has cleared somethings up. I hate to think that someone who can’t follow such a simple design is teaching high school students psychology. I mean, someone could design a very good study (like this one) and you totally miss the point and give them a bad grade, discouraging them from psychology.The study was peer reviewed by top scholars in the field (JESP, which it was accepted to, is a top level journal in psychology). I am sure if it sucked as bad as you seem to think, they wouldn’t have published it. Hopefully you get it now.Nathan Heflick

  • heflick nathan

    Art:Real quick. You are missing the point of the study and that is throwing you way off. If the study was about comparing Jolie to Palin, or whatever else you are thinking, then this would be an awful design.But the point of the study, as I have written many, many times, was to test if focusing on a woman’s appearance impacts how people feel and think about her. And, consistent with decades of past research testing similar ideas, we found that it most certainly did.And the fact that the sample was mostly democrats has little to do with this. Palin AND Jolie were rated worse on competence after people focused on their appearance compared to their personality. And also, we found that only non-democrats were LESS likely to vote for Palin after focusing on her appearance.Lastly, I am not a professor (Jamie is though). I am a grad student, but thanks for promoting me! I could use the extra cash.

  • Anonymous User

    Thanks for responding. I still think that your study lacks a control group. Yes, I can follow this design now that you’ve explained it better, but I still don’t think it is valid. Both Jolie and Palin are considered attractive. Where is the neutral variable? Again, I don’t know why you don’t see the biased sample as a complication. If the majority of your subjects are liberal-leaning, then they have some political biases against Palin–I hardly think those biases would influence the results toward Jolie. However, with this whole crisis with Jolie’s husband and his ex, I’m sure some of your celebrity-worshiping young subjects have taken sides in the great debate. (I don’t follow it seriously, but I also teach sociology so following low-brow “news” is a necessary job hazard.) I would be more convinced of your results if the subjects were rating anonymous people. I still can’t give your design anything above a C, however. As far as discouraging my students by blasting their designs, I don’t. They end up becoming more meticulous and more likely to critique a shaky study, which I still think your is. However, I’m not a “My Way or Highway” teacher, either. I’m open to compromise. I’ve often disagreed completely with the conclusions of a study, as I’m sure you’ve done with other studies, but grade the students on the work they put into the study itself, but their designs still has to pass muster. If you are convinced that this result is valid, then you should be able to replicate the results. You are free to use my design for your doctoral thesis, as long as you give me some “props” on your book tour. Art

  • heflick nathan

    Art: You are missing the point of the study. I don’t know what else to say.Palin was equally attractive and we had an equal number of Palin haters and lovers in both conditions related to Palin. The only thing that differed is what we forced people to focus on. So clearly, the liberal leaning had nothing to do with the effect of appearance focus on her ratings of competence. You could argue that focusing on appearance only lowers competence if you don’t like the person (since we had mostly dem participants). But even then, we found the voting effect only for republicans and independents, many of which did like her. And further, Jolie wasn’t hated by most of the participants and we found the same effects for her.I don’t know what else to say. Some people will never get it, apparently. What is sad is that these people that don’t get it could possibly spread this to others who take their word for it that this study (or anything else) sucks.

  • Anonymous User

    I’m going to attempt a similar study with my psych class next year, without biasing the study by discussing this study first. I get what you are trying to do, I just question the manner in which you attempted to arrive at your findings. Honest people can disagree on methodology and I sincerely hope that students in your classes are at liberty to do so. Good luck to you. Art

  • Anonymous User

    you mean it wasn’t cause she was clueless and suspect of bullying and believes no knowledge for sex ed and shoots things and is big oil and big pork and the interview with COURIC and THE SNL SKIT and and and….?THE HUGE fanfare about WARDROBE PURCHASE WHEN AMERICANS WERE LOSING homes and JOBS .. wasn’t pretty for other reasons.I THINK THE VARIABLES AREN’T ALL THERE IN THIS STUDY.

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