Being beautiful has its advantages. It can make you more popular, even make you seem more competent. Now, University of Haifa researchers have found that, if you’re a politician, good looks will also make you seem more newsworthy. Because better-looking pols get more media coverage, findings that appear in the International Journal of Press/Politics . [Yariv Tsfati, Dana Markowitz Elfassi and Israel Waismel-Manor, http://bit.ly/cNXbpx ]

People respond to pretty faces. And broadcasters, it seems, are no exception. The researchers surveyed how much TV news coverage was given to every member of the Israeli Knesset on three local channels. At the same time, they showed pictures of these elected officials to Dutch students who knew nothing about Israeli legislators. And they asked the students to rate the politicians’ physical attractiveness. The results: generally speaking, the Knesset members with the highest marks for appearance appear most often on the nightly news. [More]



Israel - University of Haifa - Knesset - Middle East - Human physical appearance

Being beautiful has its advantages. It can make you more popular, even make you seem more competent. Now, University of Haifa researchers have found that, if you’re a politician, good looks will also make you seem more newsworthy. Because better-looking pols get more media coverage, findings that appear in the International Journal of Press/Politics . [Yariv Tsfati, Dana Markowitz Elfassi and Israel Waismel-Manor, http://bit.ly/cNXbpx ]

People respond to pretty faces. And broadcasters, it seems, are no exception. The researchers surveyed how much TV news coverage was given to every member of the Israeli Knesset on three local channels. At the same time, they showed pictures of these elected officials to Dutch students who knew nothing about Israeli legislators. And they asked the students to rate the politicians’ physical attractiveness. The results: generally speaking, the Knesset members with the highest marks for appearance appear most often on the nightly news. [More]



Israel - University of Haifa - Knesset - Middle East - Human physical appearance

Being beautiful has its advantages. It can make you more popular, even make you seem more competent. Now, University of Haifa researchers have found that if you’re a politician, good looks will also make you seem more newsworthy--because better-looking pols get more media coverage, findings that appear in the International Journal of Press/Politics . [Yariv Tsfati, Dana Markowitz Elfassi and Israel Waismel-Manor, http://bit.ly/cNXbpx ]

People respond to pretty faces. And broadcasters, it seems, are no exception. The researchers surveyed how much TV news coverage was given to every member of the Israeli Knesset on three local channels. At the same time, they showed pictures of these elected officials to Dutch students who knew nothing about Israeli legislators, and they asked the students to rate the politicians’ physical attractiveness. The results: generally speaking, the Knesset members with the highest marks for appearance appear most often on the nightly news. [More]



Israel - University of Haifa - Knesset - Middle East - Human physical appearance

We’ve all heard that people favor their own kind and discriminate against out-groups--but that’s a simplistic view of prejudice, says Amy Cuddy, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies how we judge others. In recent years she and psychologists Susan Fiske of Princeton University and Peter Glick of Lawrence University have developed a powerful new model. All over the world, it turns out, people judge others on two main qualities: warmth (whether they are friendly and well intentioned) and competence (whether they have the ability to deliver on those intentions). A growing number of psychological researchers are turning their focus to this rubric, refining it and looking for ways in which we can put this new understanding of first impressions to use.

When we meet a person, we immediately and often unconsciously assess him or her for both warmth and competence. Whereas we obviously admire and help people who are both warm and competent and feel and act contemptuously toward the cold and incompetent, we respond ambivalently toward the other blends. People who are judged as competent but cold--including those in stereotyped groups such as Jews, Asians and the wealthy--provoke envy and a desire to harm, as violence against these groups has often shown. And people usually seen as warm but incompetent, such as mothers and the elderly, elicit pity and benign neglect. [More]