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Monkeys Can Predict Election Outcomes
The primate origins of our political preferences
According to a fascinating preprint by researchers Yaoguang Jiang, Annamarie Huttunen, Naz Belkaya, and Michael Platt, our furry primate cousins have an uncanny knack for forecasting which candidates will win, simply by looking at their faces. Here we show that rhesus macaques, who have no knowledge about political candidates or their policies, implicitly predict the outcomes of U.S. gubernatorial and senatorial elections based solely on visual features. “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.”
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