The effect of changes in the facial appearance on politician image

Current study presents analysis of politician image based on comparison between two parallel versions of his facial appearance: with and without moustache. The experiment was conducted on 395 adult Poles not familiar with politician presented at photo. To assess the impact of the moustache on image the Kaid’s semantic differential was used. Exploratory factor analysis revealed two dimensions of image: the expert dimension and the close-to-people politician dimension (correspondent with John Sullivan’s model of superman and everyman political image). The analyses indicated that the presence of moustache (in comparison to lack of moustache) results in lower rates on the expert dimension among men and higher rates on the close-topeople dimension among women. As a result, actual introduced change in image (shaving the moustache) brings mixed effects, not all of them beneficiary for candidate. The results are discussed in terms of Alexander Todorov’s model of perception of people based on their facial appearance. peerReviewed publishedVersion