Word: todorov
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Meta-analyses can be a steamroller," says Alexandre Todorov, a genetic epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., whose 2007 peer-reviewed study was included in the JAMA piece. (While Todorov's study found an association between the gene and depression, it was based on a different variant - the long allele as opposed to the short one.) "If you have three studies and two find nothing and the third finds something significant, that does not mean that the third study is not real...
...particular interest is a 2005 psychology paper published in Science by Alexander Todorov of Princeton and his colleagues, which concludes that “rapid, unreflective trait inferences can contribute to voting choices,” rather than deliberative reasoning. In trials the researchers vindicated their hypothesis: Almost 72 percent of Senate race outcomes were successfully predicted simply by showing a sample of the electorate pictures of the candidates for whom they could vote for milliseconds at a time, and asking them to make snap judgments on those candidates’ competence...
...it’s not so simple as that, says Todorov. The findings in Science suggest that attractiveness, likeability, and the appearance of trustworthiness play a negligible role in the instantaneous decisions we make about our future leaders. In the end, they suggest, the countenance of competence is all that matters. The hypothesis is heartening—that, even subconsciously, our eyes return to a genuine, if superficial, appraisal of ‘readiness’—but could certainly tip the ‘shallow campaign’ back towards white-haired Sen. McCain...
...reason for wanting to slap Kim Jong Il. Shouldn't we be beyond just not liking someone's face? I always thought so, but recently the folks at Princeton University reassured me that, nope, it's perfectly fine and in fact entirely human. A study by psychologist Alex Todorov shows that we form opinions about a person with a 100-millisecond glance at the face alone. What's more, you can't even blame your higher brain for such bias. The impulse seems to arise in the primitive amygdala. If your prefrontal cortex is your summa cum laude lobe...
...Todorov has a special interest in politicians, people for whom physiognomy can be destiny. Take Mikhail Gorbachev. After the ursine Leonid Brezhnev, Gorby was Kris Kringle. His rounded cheeks, his careless hairlessness, even his great red spot all left him looking disarmingly rumpled. That was a guy who not only could dismantle an empire and knock down a wall but would also remember to keep caramels in his pocket for the grandkids. Vladimir Putin, by contrast, is less gentle grandpa than live mink. President George W. Bush may have looked into Putin's soul and been reassured by what...