In a “provocative” new study, researchers sought to test a strange but intriguing hypothesis.
Could three monkeys predict whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will win the US presidential election just by looking at photos of the candidates?
The idea may seem ridiculous, but the findings suggest otherwise.
Researchers tracked the eye movements of monkeys as they showed them hundreds of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial candidates.
They found that the macaques stared more often at the faces of losing American political candidates.
A BANANAS STUDY: Researchers tested whether monkeys could predict the outcome of American political elections, including the 2024 presidential election
“They detect something purely based on the image,” said co-author Yaoguang Jiang, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jiang and his colleagues have been studying facial preference in monkeys for years.
The pre-print for this most recent study was published this month on bioRxiv and has not yet been reviewed by other scientists.
Previously, they conducted ‘monkey Tinder’ experiments, in which macaques were shown photographs of monkeys they had previously seen.
They found that the monkeys looked only briefly at a high-status man, but did look at an image of a low-status man or woman.
According to the researchers, this is probably because monkeys often see staring as a sign of aggression.
Jiang and his team wondered whether the monkeys would show the same behavior when looking at human faces.
To test this theory, they showed three adult male macaques photographs of pairs of candidates in the U.S. Senate, governor, and presidential elections and tracked how their eyes moved across the image.
The monkeys usually focused their gaze on one candidate per pair.
When the monkeys were shown photos of pairs of candidates from nearly 300 Senate and gubernatorial elections from 1995 to 2008, they looked longer at the losing candidate 54 percent of the time.
Three adult male macaques were shown side-by-side photographs of pairs of candidates from previous elections for Senate, Governor and President, while researchers tracked their eye movements
When the monkeys were shown photos of candidates from swing state elections, they chose the loser 58 percent of the time.
But in the presidential election from 2000 to 2020, the monkeys only guessed the loser 50 percent of the time, no more accurate than flipping a coin.
And when he was shown photos of this year’s presidential candidates, “it was a toss-up,” said co-author Michael Platt, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, Science.
But the monkeys did predict that Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), would lose if he ran directly against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), Harris’s running mate.
Taken together, the researchers’ findings suggest that candidates’ faces convey information that is somehow related to how voters cast their ballots, Platt said.
In general, the monkeys looked longer at losing candidates. But this correlation did not manifest itself for presidential candidates.
The researchers believe that some of that information may come from the candidates’ facial structure.
For example, the size and shape of a person’s jawline can be an indication of social dominance, causing the monkeys to stare at the candidate with a weaker jawline.
The team found that the winning candidates had an average of 2 percent more “prominent” jaws, based on the ratio of the jaw to the cheek.
But leading election forecasters are skeptical of the monkey-based prediction method.
“How many elections in advance, where the outcome is not yet known — as opposed to previous elections where the outcome was known — has the method predicted?” Allen Lichtman, a historian who has accurately predicted the outcome of nearly every presidential election over the past 40 years, asked Science.
“If the answer is no, I’m done. I have no further interest,” he added.
Gary King, a political scientist who analyzed 28 years of congressional election results to create his own prediction model, told Science that the connections the study found are “kind of interesting.”
However, he doubts whether this monkey method would be more effective than existing methods of predicting elections, which analyze voter income, ideology, past voting behavior and other important factors.
However, Platt says the research shows a clear connection whether you believe in the monkeys’ predictive powers or not.
“When it comes to voting — and really all of our other behavior — there’s a little monkey inside all of us,” he said.
