Here’s What Voters Think of Politicians Who Wear Glasses

Wearing eyeglasses can improve U.S. politicians’ chances of getting elected, new research suggests.

A team headed up by Alexandra Fleischmann of the University of Cologne found that study participants preferred candidates with glasses and perceived them as more intelligent, the Pacific Standard reports.

The authors noted that politicians appear to shun glasses and that no politician since Harry Truman has worn glasses in public.

It’s likely that they avoid glasses because of “possible associations with vision deficiency, old age, and weakness,” they wrote.

“While politicians often believe that glasses can hurt their electoral success, we show in eight experiments that glasses actually increase electoral success,” the wrote in a paper published in the journal Social Psychology.

Most of the experiments involved about 200 participants. One experiment involved about 400 participants, including approximately equal numbers from the U.S. and India.

The finding that glasses provide an electoral advantage “did not extend to India … due to different cultural associations with glasses,” the authors wrote.

Read more at the the Pacific Standard