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Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

nature.com

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Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#92

Post by klmadfejno »

wycy wrote: post #32
kicat wrote: post #18

I only skimmed the paper, so I'm not claiming to know much about it, but one thing to keep in mind here is that a fair coin has a 50% accuracy using the same terminology as the headline. I'm not saying 72% is not an interesting achievement, its just that "you can do about 50% better than random chance" describes my gut feeling about how much you could actually see in someones face.

They do note the random chance bit, and they also note that it's better than humans could judge on their own and even, surprisingly, better than judged by a personality questionnaire. > Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal–conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%).

Were the humans experts or just random people though?

The real question is whether the tool can beat a lookup table of age, race, and gender probabilities. The tool isn't going to be winning points of phrenology here. Weight, hair color, and hairstyle would also likely tell you a lot.

I don't have any particular reason to believe this tool wouldn't work, but let's not pretend it's getting their by phrenology-esque topologies of people's faces.

A randomly chosen black individual in the united states has a > 72% chance of leaning democrat. A randomly chosen hispanic individual is ~55-65% chance of leaning democrat. I don't find it crazy to imagine they've got a few other smaller features to boost it.

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#93

Post by ralusek »

motohagiography wrote: post #73

> These self-selected, naturalistic images combine many potential cues to political orientation, ranging from facial expression and self-presentation to facial morphology. I was going to ask how they controlled for the presence of compound bows & deer, trucks, and tank tops in the photos, but this implies they did not. Another one would be lighting palette, since that's going to be biased to regions as well. There is…

I was going to ask the same about colored hair, facial asymmetry, hammer and sickles on shirts, and scowls.

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#94

Post by goatinaboat »

mc32 wrote: post #63

I can see making inferences from dress, makeup, style, etc. But, this is surprising; “facial morphology” This skims somewhat close to people who tried to infer criminality from facial and cranial characteristics... a century ago

But, this is surprising; “facial morphology”

You could probably get this from how fat their face was, or how unhealthy their complexion, e.g. https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5e3z7/gym-bros-more-likely-...

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#97

Post by ip26 »

mc32 wrote: post #63

I can see making inferences from dress, makeup, style, etc. But, this is surprising; “facial morphology” This skims somewhat close to people who tried to infer criminality from facial and cranial characteristics... a century ago

I don’t think it’s crazy, what if rural areas (which lean conservative) have biased ethnicity? For example, if the Irish, Italians & Asians mostly immigrated to urban areas while Germans and French mostly immigrated to rural areas, then if you can guess the ethnicity from facial structure you can make a guess on political leanings.
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