Understanding the Role of Candidates’ Visual Information: Application of the Conjoint Analysis and Eye Tracking Technique

After the innovative study of Todorov and his collaborators, it is commonly accepted that voters are strongly influenced by the visual information of candidates. However, the question is not clearly answered why visual information affects voters' decision. Some scholars consider better-looking candidates are favored because of the beauty hallo effects while others consider voters infer the traits of candidates from their faces. I focus on this problem and discover the role of candidates' visual information in voting experiments. In this presentation, I use the choice based conjoint analysis and eye tracking technology for answering the question. Conjoint analysis is now a common tool to compare the relative importance of factors in voting decisions. Comparing the picture based conjoint analyses with the verbal based one, I investigate how visual cues change the relative importance of candidate attributes. In addition, visual cues may affect the points of attention of voters and cause the attributes non-attendance, which is a phenomenon that voters only focus on a few attributes of candidates and neglect other attributes. Eye tracking devices can objectively check the points of attention and analyze whether respondents neglect some attributes or not. Using these two new techniques, I discover how candidates’ visual information affects voters’ decision.