The Role Of Appearance And Gender Cues On Voting Behavior And Implicit Mechanism

Political electoral research increasing emphasizes the combination of basic characteristics of candidate with the cognitive processing strategy of voter, hoping to explore their effects on voting behavior and voter choice. Many researches suggested that perceptions of the personal traits and competence of candidates were influenced by factors such as a candidate's physical attractiveness and gender cues, which effected voter choice. However, the researches on politics are limited to phenomenon description, they lack valid control of variables, or most of the research methods are correlation analysis based on questionnaire or poll measure. So the voter's mental mechanism in electoral decision making can't be explored.Recently, great advance has been made in stereotype (in particular implicit stereotype) and its effect on cognitive processing. Although there are still disagreements in the nature and mechanism which stereotype in cognitive processing model employs to process consistent and inconsistent information, these researches had important illuminating value for political electoral behavior research. However, these researches in the line have not been conducted so far.The present study explored the effect of stereotype on voting behavior and its implicit mechanism, by using for stereotype cognitive processing theory and EAST experiment paradigm, a measure method. In simulated election situation, the present study controlled the appearance of candidate (beautiful/ugly) and gender (male/female) and information of external evaluation (no external evaluation information/stereotype-consistent information /stereotype-inconsistent information) to examine how appearance, gender of candidate and information of external evaluation affect electoral outcome and its cognitive processing mechanism, with a view to gain a comprehensive understanding of the electoral cognitive processing mechanism.The present study consisted of two parts, the first was a preliminary one which aimed to select the needed candidate photos, trait words and information of external evaluation, by requiring participants to judge whether the candidate photos were beautiful or ugly ones, whether the trait words expressed the traits which chairmen of student union were supposed to have, and the related information about the post of chairman; the second was a formal one which aimed to explore how candidate appearance and gender stereotypes influenced voting behavior and how external evaluation information adjusted this mechanism under the...