This article made me laugh. Also a good example of how our behavior is shaped by deep-rooted behavioral patterns that have evolved over thousands of years under various selection pressures. This one made me laugh. Also a good example of how our behavior is shaped by deep-rooted behavioral patterns that have evolved over thousands of years under various selection pressures.

Why do monkeys look for longer at losers than winners? Jiang and team argue that it’s because winners tend to be more facially masculine, and monkeys have a built-in tendency to avoid staring too long at masculine faces. In monkey communities, sustained eye contact represents a direct monkey challenge. Monkeys therefore limit the time they spend looking at dominant or masculine individuals, to avoid incurring their wrath.1

The fact, however, that monkey eye-contact patterns predict human voting patterns suggests that humans, like their monkey counterparts, are responsive to facial masculinity - and not only that we’re responsive to it, but that it affects the way we vote.

“Our findings,” note Jiang and colleagues, “endorse the idea that voters spontaneously respond to evolutionarily conserved visual cues to physical prowess and that voting behavior is shaped, in part, by ancestral adaptations shared with nonhuman primates.”

Of course, voting patterns aren’t just a product of facial masculinity. As the researchers point out,

Based solely on facial masculinity cues, female candidates are projected to lose most races. Yet voters chose the female candidate about half the time (overall female winning probability = 48.8% in our sample), indicating other factors besides facial masculinity contribute to voting decisions.