Perceiving Politics: Considering the Political Categorization of Faces

Categorizing people into groups is a fundamentally human trait, but we know very little about how people assign political identities to strangers. Across two innovative survey experiments, we consider how people politically categorize others according to a single source of information: faces. We find that displays of emotions, particularly negative emotions, predict the political sorting of strangers. Faces featuring negative emotions are categorized as out-partisans, whereas faces exhibiting happiness are categorized as co-partisans.