Politics and skin tone perception?

A University of Chicago research study might have uncovered something interesting and a little disturbing.  Researcher Eugene Caruso led a study in which some pictures of President (then candidate) Obama were darkened and some were lightened, while some were kept as is.  The photos, 16 in all, were shown to students and they were asked which ones were most representative of Obama.

Turns out that liberal participants liked their Obama light and conservative participants liked their Obama dark.  Additionally, thinking that the light Obama was most representative of the real Obama was a good indicator of if they were going to vote for Obama in the presidential elections, which were soon after the study.  The researchers even controlled for race and political party of the participants.  Which means 1.) Didn’t matter if you were black or white.  Light Obama is probably still your favorite if you like Obama and if you don’t like Obama then you think he’s dark. 2.) Are conservatives still afraid of darker skinned people or is this one of those “what came first…?” things?  3.) Any person who might remotely remember anything from a stat class (and I barely remember anything) knows that correlation does not equal causation, so you should probably take the results of this study with a grain of salt.

Interestingly, the researchers did the same study with photos of John McCain and found no correlation between skin tone perception and political leaning.  Turns out its not “light so its got to be right”… its left seems to like the light.  To test this further the researchers would like to do the same study with a bi-racial conservative to see if conservatives will think their politician is light because they agree with him.