KEY POINTS:
Snap judgments of New Zealand high school girls helped researchers at the University of Pennsylvania to predict that John McCain would be the Republican nominee for the United States presidency later this year.
Earlier this year, McCain came from nowhere to defeat once-favoured Republicans Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson but Dr Kesten Green, an expert in the forecasting of decisions, said it was no surprise to a team of researchers based at Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School.
"They predicted this outcome in August 2007 by relying on the snap judgments of New Zealand schoolgirls," he said yesterday.
Dr Green, a Wellington-based senior research fellow in the business and economic forecasting unit at Melbourne's Monash University, said a Princeton University professor, Alexander Todorov, found that snap judgments of competence, based on a quick look at pictures of candidates' faces, had done a good job of predicting the winners of congressional and senate races.
With Professor Scott Armstrong, of the Wharton school, and professors Randall Jones in the US and Malcolm Wright in Australia, Dr Green extended this research to US presidential primaries.
From May through mid-August 2007, the researchers obtained ratings of facial competence of 24 potential contenders for the major party nominations for president in 2008.
The only information provided to the people they surveyed was colour photographs of the candidates. They deliberately asked people with little knowledge of the candidates: university students in Australia and New Zealand and high school girls in New Zealand.
Where some of the students recognised Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in particular, their ratings were excluded.
- NZPA
