I’ve followed this research closely. It has been run on thousands of subjects in carefully controlled multiple trials over a few years. The methodology is meticulous. The findings have been published in peer-reviewed journals. This Stanford Magazine article touches on it. I liked the illustration. The finding is simple — using the same morphing software you can buy online for twenty or thirty dollars, researchers morphed subjects’ faces into the photographs of political candidates. Without knowing that their own faces had been incorporated, potential voters who either weakly favored one candidate or had not yet made a decision decided to choose the candidate that subliminally resembled themselves — even though they were not told about the morphing until after they made their choices. Candidates can be made to look more caucasian, asian, etc. — depending, I presume, on the precinct:

…a Bailenson experiment done before the 2004 election in collaboration with Shanto Iyengar, director of Stanford’s Political Communication Lab, partially morphed the photos of undecided voters with those of either George Bush or John Kerry. Voters preferred the candidate they’d been morphed into—but could not consciously detect that the photo contained their own face.

I’ve followed this research closely. It has been run on thousands of subjects in carefully controlled multiple trials over a few years. The methodology is meticulous. The findings have been published in peer-reviewed journals. This Stanford Magazine article touches on it. I liked the illustration. The finding is simple — using the same morphing software [...]