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02/19/2008: "People vote for people who look like them"
"In this particular study we showed pictures in a computer screen very briefly, at the threshold of conscious recognition. Subjects had to report whether they recognized or not the particular picture showed in each trial. The key point is that, since the pictures are shown very briefly, for exactly the same visual input sometimes the subjects reported recognizing the picture and sometimes not recognizing it. Then we could ask whether the neurons fire according to the subjects' conscious perception or the actual visual inputs.
"We found that the neurons we recorded responded to the conscious perception in an "all-or-none" way by dramatically changing their firing rate only when the pictures were recognized.
"For example, a neuron in the hippocampus of one patient fired very strongly to a picture of the patient's brother when recognized and remained completely silent when it was not, another neuron behaved in the same manner with pictures of the World Trade Centre, etc.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080214114517.htm
"Voters identify with political candidates in many ways, including agreeing with their positions on issues, holding the same party affiliation, belonging to the same social categories such as race or gender, or even having common physical traits such as height and facial appearance," notes the study's authors. "In the current work, we examined the relative effects of different forms of similarity on candidate evaluations by using an experimental design that manipulated the degree of candidate-voter facial similarity."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080218-study-familiarity-often-breeds-votes-for-the-next-president.html
http://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2007/bailenson-facial-similarity.pdf
[ We're born to tribal loyalty, and gradually trained to the promise of more food/money from our captors. ]