• Tikiporch
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    16 days ago

    The fact that an attractive woman acting crazy brings perceived shitty voters to your mind does say something about you

    The dude said she voted for Trump, that’s what brought it to my mind…

    Are you a psychologist who has studied this for a few years?

    No. Do I need to be?

    I have eyes that can see, and the ability to read. Political scientists and psychologists have studied this exact topic, so there is data on how physical appearance and vanity impact voter turnout. The research makes a key distinction between people who are generally considered attractive versus people who think they are highly attractive, the former of which is what I think you think my argument is. RE: the former, interestingly, studies (like Peterson and Palmer in 2017) show that attractive people actually vote more because the “halo effect” of being treated well by society gives them high social confidence.

    However, the data shifts completely when you look at pure vanity. Recent psychological research found that exceptionally high self-perceived attractiveness directly increases “psychological entitlement”, or the belief that a person is inherently deserving of special treatment. When you cross-reference that with political participation data (like a 2020 study by Fazekas and Hatemi), it shows that this specific trait of entitlement drives actual voter turnout down.

    SO, while highly vain people might be loud on social media or at protests, they tend to avoid the actual ballot box. Psychologists theorize this is because they dislike the egalitarian nature of waiting in line to cast an anonymous vote that carries the exact same mathematical weight as everyone else’s.

    So the data does exist, and it supports the idea that vanity and entitlement lead to lower turnout on election day.

    • TrickDacy
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      16 days ago

      Do I need to be?

      To make a bold claim like that and present it as true, absolutely yes you do.