Listening to candidates debate may not be the best way of guessing who will win an election.

A study by two US universities found that people were better at predicting election winners solely on the candidates' appearance rather than hearing what they have to say.

"We found that snap decisions based on charisma are a good predictor of election outcomes," research co-author Daniel Benjamin of Dartmouth College said in a statement.

Moreover, co-author Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago said: "Hearing what they say makes you worse at predicting."

The study used 10-second long silent video clip extracts of debates from 58 gubernatorial elections between 1988 and 2002. Some 264 subjects participated in the study.

The video clips did not give the candidate's name or party affiliation, and the segments were always of debates between two white male candidates to eliminate race and gender wild cards .

Based on this limited information, the volunteers were asked to guess which candidate had won. The study found that the subjects were quite good at guessing the winner.

The research, however, was unable to determine which physical attributes gave a candidate the edge.

"There is something mysterious about it," Shapiro said. "People's readings of physical attractiveness are not very predictive. It's who they think would win. It's not just who is good looking, it's something else."

With the audio on, subjects were no better at predicting an outcome, Shapiro said.

According to Benjamin, the research "may help to explain for example why experts forecasters, who are highly informed about and attentive to policy matters, have been found to perform no better than chance in predicting elections."

The study, however, did not predict who had the charisma to win the races in Tuesday's US legislative and gubernatorial elections.

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如果要预测选举中哪位候选人会获胜，其实不用听他们的竞选演说。

美国两所大学所做的一项研究表明，单凭候选人的外表来预测选举结果也比听他们的演说要来得准。

研究报告的撰写者之一、达特默斯大学的丹尼尔·本杰明在一份声明中说：“我们发现，对候选人个人魅力的第一印象有助于预测选举结果。”

研究报告的另一位撰写者、芝加哥大学的耶西·夏皮罗说：“听他们的演说反倒会影响判断。”

研究人员将1988年至2002年间共58次州长竞选的辩论录像制作成10秒钟的消声视频剪辑，并邀请264名调查对象参加了实验。

视频剪辑中没有提供候选人姓名及其所属档派的信息，为了消除种族和性别方面的影响，所有片断都是两名男性白种候选人之间的辩论。

调查对象看完仅有10秒钟的消声录像，就得猜出哪位候选人获胜。结果发现，调查对象猜的都很准。

但是，这项研究并没有发现哪种外表特征对于选举获胜特别有利。

夏皮罗说：“有些东西无法解释。其实，外表也不是最关键的因素，除外表外，对候选人的直觉也很重要。”

他说，即使将录像的音频打开，也没发现对调查对象的预测有什么帮助。

本杰明说，这项研究“可以解释为什么预测专家虽然对候选人的竞选纲领了如指掌，但他们在预测选举结果时往往也是碰运气。”

然而，这项研究没有预测谁将赢得于本周二开始的中期国会选举和州长选举。