Predicting Election Outcomes from Facial Images of Candidates Using an Unbiased Machine Learning Model

Abstract

In the past, studies on psychology have shown that humans are capable of creating instantaneous judgments of a stranger’s personality and characteristics, just based on a picture of their face. The most successful study to our knowledge has reached a 72.4% accuracy in predicting election outcomes. There have been machine learning studies that tried to replicate this success, but to our knowledge, some kind of human input and bias has always been present. We wanted to create a bias-free, independent machine learning model that only used the image of political candidates to predict their success. With no other information than a candidate’s face, we were able to achieve a 70.43% accuracy predicting election results. Not only does the different approaches in our experiment give a quantitative way to compare different types of human thinking, but it can be used as a benchmark for future research that further investigates the relationship between facial traits, human judgments, and machine learning.