Jumping to conclusions / WYSIATI

"[...] This ancient mechanism is put to a novel use in the modern world: it has some influence on how people vote. Todorov showed his students pictures of men's faces, sometimes for as little as one-tenth of a second, and asked them to rate the faces on various attributes, including likability and competence. Observers agreed quite well on those ratings. The faces that Todorov showed were not a random set: they were the campaign portraits of politicians competing for elective office. Todorov then compared the results of the electoral races to the ratings of competence that Princeton students had made, based on brief exposure to photographs and without any political context. in about 70% of the races for senator, congressman, and governer, the election winner was the candidate whose face had earned a higher rating of competence. This striking result was quickly confirmed in national elections in Finlan, in zoning board elections in England, and in various electoral contests in Australia, Germany, and Mexico. Surprisingly (at least to me), ratings of competence were far more predictive of voting outcomes in Todorov's study than ratings of likability. Todorov has found that people judge competence by combining the two dimensions of strenghth and trustworthiness. The faces that exude competence combine a strong chin with a slight confident-appearing smile. There is no evidence that these facial features actually predict how well polticians will perform in office. But studies of the brain's response to winning and losing candidates show that we are biologically predisposed to reject candidates who lack the attributes we value. [...] As expected, the effect of facial competence on voting is about three times larger for information-poor and TV-prone voters than for others who are better informed and watch less television." 
Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking Fast and Slow