When considering what the best processor is for your PC, Intel offers stiff competition in productivity and gaming, despite facing downAMD’s Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 9000 CPUs. Intel’s parts just need a bit more power to do it.
Although the Core Ultra 9 285K is the latest flagship CPU from Intel, it only just scrapes onto this list. There are lot of CPUs we’d recommend instead, and they all feature here as part of the best Intel CPUs you can buy in 2024.
Why you should buy this: It’s inexpensive, packed with cores, and offers much more performance than its price would suggest.
Who it’s for: Gamers and power users who want peak performance without breaking the bank.
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What we thought of the Intel Core i5-13600K:
The dilemma between Core i5 and Core i7 is always present with Intel processors, but the Core i5-13600K changes that dynamic. It’s much cheaper than the 14700K while offering similar performance in both productivity tasks and gaming. In some cases, it even beats down the flagship Core i9-13900K, making it one of the best CPUs you can buy right now.
It’s even competitive with the new-gen 265K and 285K for gaming, which is embarrassing for Intel, but great for budget-minded gamers.
For around $220, you’re getting a 14-core CPU with clock speeds upward of 5.1GHz, which would have been unheard of even a couple of years ago. Not all of those 14 cores are built equally, though. Similar to Intel’s previous generation, the Core i5-13600K mixes performance (P) cores and efficient (E) cores. With the Core i5-13600K, you’re getting six P-cores and eight E-cores.
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The six P-cores are more than enough for gaming, which is what allows the Core i5-13600K to compete with AMD’s Ryzen 5 7600X at a similar price. It’s the extra E-cores where Intel shoots ahead, though, offering better multi-core performance in demanding tasks like video encoding and rendering.
You can overclock it for added performance too, helping it compete more readily with higher-end options in gaming and productivity.
For additional savings, look out for the 13600KF, as it can often be found for a few dollars cheaper. If you want to stretch your budget a bit further, the 13700K isn’t much more and gives you a couple of extra cores to play with for increased performance in select apps and games.
Intel Core i5-13600K
The best Intel processor
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Intel
Intel Core i5-13400F
The best budget Intel processor
Pros
Excellent value
10 cores on a recent architecture
Fantastic gaming performance
Cons
No integrated graphics
Doesn’t support overclocking
Why you should buy this: It’s inexpensive while still offering highly competitive performance.
Who it’s for: PC builders on a tight budget that only need a few cores.
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What we thought of the Intel Core i5-13400F:
Intel always follows up its main releases with more budget-friendly options as a generation goes on, and unfortunately, they don’t always get the limelight they deserve. That couldn’t be more true than it is with the Core i5-13400F. For not much more than $150, you get a seriously powerful CPU for gaming and anything else besides.
This one comes from the Intel 13th generation, which isn’t exactly cutting-edge, but don’t let that scare you off. The Core i5-13400F opts for six performance cores and four efficiency cores, giving it strong multithreading performance, at a fair price.
Gaming is where the chip shines most, oftentimes only taking a backseat of 5% to 10% compared to the more expensive Core i5-13600K. You can push the processor further by removing its power limit, too, allowing it to rival even the Core i9-12900K from a couple of generations back. That’s a lot of CPU power for around $150.
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There are a couple of caveats for this one, though. For starters, it doesn’t support overclocking, but you can still remove the power limit for a performance boost. In addition, it doesn’t include integrated graphics, so you’ll need to pair the CPU with one of the best graphics cards. You can pick up the Core i5-13400, which is the same CPU with integrated graphics, but it’s about $25 more expensive.
Intel Core i5-13400F
The best budget Intel processor
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Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
Intel Core i9-14900K
The fastest Intel processor for gaming
Pros
Big improvements in gaming performance
Same pricing as previous generation
Works with LGA1700 socket
AI-assisted overclocking on 14900K
Cons
Minor productivity improvements
Still slower than AMD 3D V-Cache chips
Still very power hungry
Why you should buy this: It’s the most powerful Intel CPU for gaming you can buy right now.
Who it’s for: Anyone upgrading from 12th-gen or older.
What we thought of the Intel Core i9-14900K:
Intel’s Core i9-14900K is a refresh, and because of that, it doesn’t bring major performance improvements to the Core i9-13900K, which we’ll get to next. For most people, the Core i9-13900K is still the CPU to buy. If you’re looking for the absolute best gaming performance, though, the Core i9-14900K offers it. The 285K might be newer, but it falls short in too many games to be recommendable.
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The 14900K is close in gaming performance to AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X3D, and weak productivity tasks, such as compression, are better with the new 14th-gen chips. However, areas like rendering and transcoding remain largely unchanged compared to the previous generation.
There’s no upgrade path with this chip, though. Next time you upgrade, you’ll need a new motherboard too.
Intel Core i9-14900K
The fastest Intel processor for gaming
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Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
Intel Core i9-13900K
The best high-end Intel processor
Pros
Cheaper than AMD competition
Support for 600-series motherboards and DDR4
Solid multi-core improvements
Surprising gen-on-gen improvements
Cons
High power demands
Small gaming performance gains
Why you should buy this: It’s the best bang for your buck for high-end value.
Who’s it for: High-end enthusiasts who don’t mind spending up for the best of the best.
What we thought of the Intel Core i9-13900K:
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The best Intel CPU on the market right now isn’t the Arrow Lake flagships, or even the 14th-generation top dogs, but Intel’s Core i9-13900K, and that’s surprising because it’s not even the most expensive. It’s still a pricey chip, but the Core i9-13900K manages to undercut AMD’s competing Ryzen 9 7950X while offering better performance in many cases.
No small part of that performance advantage is that the Core i9-13900K comes with 24 cores. You get eight P-cores and 16 E-cores, giving you a total of 32 threads to work with. Even more impressive, the processor can boost up to 5.8GHz out of the box, offering some of the highest clock speeds available in a desktop CPU right now.
Despite sporting the 13th-gen Raptor Lake architecture, you can still use older 600-series motherboards and DDR4 memory with the Core i9-13900K, too. That makes it a much more compelling (and cheaper) upgrade path if you haven’t jumped to DDR5 quite yet.
The only downside of the Core i9-13900K is that it’s too powerful. It runs hot and draws a lot of power, and in tasks like gaming, the cheaper Core i5-13600K offers almost identical performance. If you need peak horsepower, though, nothing beats the Core i9-13900K.
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The 285K is worth considering too, as it is much faster than this chip in productivity, but the gaming performance is much less impressive.
Intel Core i9-13900K
The best high-end Intel processor
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Intel Core i3-12100F
The best Intel processor under $100
Pros
A step-up over the Core i3-10100F
Suitable for light gaming and daily use
Good performance for the price
Cons
Requires a discrete graphics card
Why you should buy this: It’s a cheap, yet decent current-gen processor that costs around $100.
Who’s it for: Users on a budget who still want a versatile CPU.
What we thought of the Intel Core i3-12100F:
It’s not part of the latest generations of Intel chips, but for around $80, the 12100F is a steal for entry level gaming and productivity.
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Equipped with four cores and eight threads as well as clock speeds reaching up to 4.3GHz, this processor is a bit of an oddity in the Alder Lake lineup, as it doesn’t share the hybrid architecture of its more expensive siblings and instead serves up only P-cores. That doesn’t make it unsuitable at all, however, and it will carry its own weight through both gaming and various daily tasks. It may not be your first choice if you want something truly powerful, but if you’re looking to keep the costs low, this should be your go-to.
If you can find it for comparable money, the 14100F is about 10% faster and worth grabbing, but otherwise the 12100F is the value king for Intel in 2024.
Intel Core i3-12100F
The best Intel processor under $100
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Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K
Best Intel CPU for productivity
Pros
Insane efficiency improvements
Delivers multi-threaded performance gains without Hyper-Threading
Runs very cool in games
A lot of headroom for CPU and memory overclocking
Cons
Gaming performance struggles
Inconsistent productivity performance
High-end memory required for best experience
Why you should buy this: It’s Intel’s fastest processor for productivity yet.
Who’s it for: Professionals who specifically want to use Intel CPUs.
What we thought of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K:
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In our review, we called the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K impressive, but not necessarily good. That’s a fair summation, because while it blows the doors off many professional and creative applications, it is very much worse in gaming than the best CPUs from recent years, and there are even some non-gaming apps that don’t fair as well, either.
That’s partly because this is a very new chip design with a new architecture and lacking in simultaneous multi-threading, but it makes full use of those cores either way, delivering awesome performance in a wide range of apps. It’s also far more efficient than recent Intel flagships have been, which is a welcome change.
This is not a good CPU for gaming though. While it’s fast in some games, it’s much slower in others, and AMD’s gaming CPUs blow it out of the water.
If you aren’t married to Intel, AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X is a very viable alternative, too, with much more consistent performance.
What’s the difference between K and F Intel processors?
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Intel uses multiple suffixes to indicate different features, but “K” and “F” are among the most common. “K” processors are unlocked, so you can overclock them with a compatible motherboard. “F” processors don’t come with integrated graphics, so you’ll need a dedicated graphics card. You may even find a “KF” processor, indicating that it’s unlocked and requires discrete graphics.
You can usually find variants of Intel’s leading i9, i7, and i5 processors with either or both suffixes. If you’re planning on building a gaming computer, you can save a few dollars by purchasing the “F” variant of a processor. On the other side, “K” processors are slightly more expensive with their overclocking capabilities. If you want a full breakdown on Intel’s naming scheme, make sure to read our CPU buying guide.
How good are AMD Ryzen processors compared to Intel?
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Intel Core and AMD Ryzen both offer excellent processors at different price points and in different forms, so one brand isn’t definitively better than the other. In 2024, though, AMD’s X3D CPUs are the best for gaming, while Intel’s lineup tends to offer more general performance, at the cost of a higher power draw. The newer AMD Ryzen processors pack a lot of cores and perform well, so they’re still very capable CPUs, but they’re a little more specific in what they’re good for.
In the mobile world, Intel used to dominate. Now, you can find devices with AMD Ryzen processors, too, and they perform great. That said, there is still a far greater number of machines that come with Intel processors, and they stack up well against the AMD competition.
How do you know which processor is best for your needs?
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To find the best processor for your needs, you need to consider the applications you want to run. If you’re into gaming, for example, a processor with strong single-core performance is a good choice because games usually stress only a handful of cores at a time. On the other hand, content creation applications like Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve can take advantage of a greater number of cores, so a processor with a lot of cores is better for them.
Those are good rules to follow. Games favor a fast processor over one with a lot of cores, and content-creation apps prefer more cores over faster ones.
How can you tell if a PC processor is any good?
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The best way to tell if a PC processor is good is to look at individual benchmarks. Specs like core count and clock speed don’t tell the full story — they only show what the processor is capable of within its own range of products. If you’ve settled on a certain brand or series, however, looking at core counts and clock speeds can show you where the processor sits in the range.
If you want to test your own processor, there are plenty of tools available. Cinebench is a great benchmarking tool that focuses solely on the processor, while PCMark 10 provides an overview of performance across a suite of day-to-day tasks.
Make sure you’re buying a CPU from a recent generation that has at least six cores, and you should be alright.
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How does Intel’s CPU naming scheme work?
Intel’s naming scheme can get a little confusing sometimes, but once you know your way around it, you’ll be able to navigate every processor by heart without needing to check what it does.
Let’s assume the processor you’re trying to look up is called “Intel Core i9-14600K.” The first part, Intel Core, refers to the brand of the processor. Intel has several brands that are not Intel Core, such as the low-end Intel Pentium or Intel Celeron. It also has some newer mobile CPUs, branded Core Ultra.
The second part is the brand modifier. This is important and refers to how powerful a particular CPU is within its generation. In adition to the budget i3, Intel also offers i5, i7, and i9. The i5 and i7 lines are typically midrange to high-end, and the i9 is reserved for high-end processors.
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Moving on to the numerical part of the name, the first two digits refer to the generation of the processor. As an example, Intel’s 14th-generation processors, Raptor Lake, all start with a “14.” The final three digits refer to the specific model and also go up depending on how good a model is.
The letter at the end refers to the type of processor. There are many variants, so check them out on Intel’s website if you want a full list. The most common ones include:
We’re still officially in “teaser trailer” territory for the new season of Squid Game but a lot of interesting details just dropped in the latest one for season two.
The new trailer takes us deeper into the games as Seong Gi-hun, played by Lee Jung-jae, returns to the island presumably to take down the rich tyrants and the Front Man from the inside of the tournament. Seong is back as a player (Player 456 again, to be specific) and at least two of the games from the last season will be part of the new one, including “Green Light” and the dalgona cookie cutting challenge. This time, however, they have an experienced contestant in the sea of green, bloodied jumpsuits who can tell them how to avoid the pitfalls (figuratively and literally if the Mirror Bridge returns).
Seong seems to be on a personal crusade to save the latest batch of players who may not have any understanding of the games and its very high stakes. Unlike last season, Seong isn’t smiling when he takes his official contestant photo. The new trailer also features an impassioned Seong trying to convince the new batch of players to vote to leave the island with their lives still intact.
The next season of Squid Game lands on Netflix the day after Christmas, but for me, it still cannot get here quick enough.
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Meta AI has announced the open-source release of MobileLLM, a set of language models optimized for mobile devices, with model checkpoints and code now accessible on Hugging Face. However, it is presently only available under a Creative Commons 4.0 non-commercial license, meaning enterprises can’t use it on commercial products.
The release of these open weights makes MobileLLM a more direct, if roundabout, competitor to Apple Intelligence, Apple’s on-device/private cloud hybrid AI solution made up of multiple models, shipping out to users of its iOS 18 operating system in the U.S. and outside the EU this week. However, being restricted to research use and requiring downloading and installation from Hugging Face, it’s likely to remain limited to a computer science and academic audience for now.
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More efficiency for mobile devices
MobileLLM aims to tackle the challenges of deploying AI models on smartphones and other resource-constrained devices.
With parameter counts ranging from 125 million to 1 billion, these models are designed to operate within the limited memory and energy capacities typical of mobile hardware.
By emphasizing architecture over sheer size, Meta’s research suggests that well-designed compact models can deliver robust AI performance directly on devices.
Resolving scaling issues
The design philosophy behind MobileLLM deviates from traditional AI scaling laws that emphasize width and large parameter counts.
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Meta AI’s research instead focuses on deep, thin architectures to maximize performance, improving how abstract concepts are captured by the model.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, highlighted the importance of these depth-focused strategies in enabling advanced AI on everyday hardware.
MobileLLM incorporates several innovations aimed at making smaller models more effective:
• Depth Over Width: The models employ deep architectures, shown to outperform wider but shallower ones in small-scale scenarios.
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• Embedding Sharing Techniques: These maximize weight efficiency, crucial for maintaining compact model architecture.
• Grouped Query Attention: Inspired by work from Ainslie et al. (2023), this method optimizes attention mechanisms.
• Immediate Block-wise Weight Sharing: A novel strategy to reduce latency by minimizing memory movement, helping keep execution efficient on mobile devices.
Performance Metrics and Comparisons
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Despite their compact size, MobileLLM models excel on benchmark tasks. The 125 million and 350 million parameter versions show 2.7% and 4.3% accuracy improvements over previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in zero-shot tasks.
Remarkably, the 350M version even matches the API calling performance of the much larger Meta Llama-2 7B model.
These gains demonstrate that well-architected smaller models can handle complex tasks effectively.
Designed for smartphones and the edge
MobileLLM’s release aligns with Meta AI’s broader efforts to democratize access to advanced AI technology.
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With the increasing demand for on-device AI due to cloud costs and privacy concerns, models like MobileLLM are set to play a pivotal role.
The models are optimized for devices with memory constraints of 6-12 GB, making them practical for integration into popular smartphones like the iPhone and Google Pixel.
Open but non-commercial
Meta AI’s decision to open-source MobileLLM reflects the company’s stated commitment to collaboration and transparency. Unfortunately, the licensing terms prohibit commercial usage for now, so only researchers can benefit.
By sharing both the model weights and pre-training code, they invite the research community to build on and refine their work.
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This could accelerate innovation in the field of small language models (SLMs), making high-quality AI accessible without reliance on extensive cloud infrastructure.
Developers and researchers interested in testing MobileLLM can now access the models on Hugging Face, fully integrated with the Transformers library. As these compact models evolve, they promise to redefine how advanced AI operates on everyday devices.
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Investors are rushing to throw millions at a hot startup called Kalshi as loans or even as unusual we’ll-figure-it-out later cash. Kalshi is an exchange that allows people to bet, as official commodity trading contracts, on the outcomes of cultural events, from election results to how long Taylor Swift’s latest album will top the charts.
Betting on the outcome of the upcoming U.S. election has spiked demand so high that Kalshi surged to the top spot on Apple’s app store, after years of being unranked among the finance category and to the seventh position overall as of this writing.
Kalshi’s need for cash reserves increased sharply to ensure it can provide instant funding for customers betting on the U.S. election. So, over the last several days, the Sequoia-backed five-year-old startup has received tens of millions from investors in short-term loans, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. Additionally, the company is currently in discussions with new and existing investors about raising a formal equity round of as much as $50 million, though it is also possible the startup could raise more, the person said.
Investors who provided capital to Kalshi so the company could sustain its growth until election day included VC firm Neo, one of its earliest backers. Neo’s founder, Ali Pavroti, sent Kalshi a total of $12.4 million, comprised of $5.4 million of Neo’s capital and $7 million of Pavroti’s personal funds, according to the now-deleted tweet posted by Kalshi’s co-founder and CEO, Tarek Mansour. While it’s extremely rare for investors to send money (much less millions) without terms locked down and a signed contract, Pavroti’s message to Mansour said, “We can figure out the terms later.”
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Kalshi opened its election market last month after a judge denied the Commodity Futures and Trade Commission’s request to block the trading of elections-linked derivatives. (The CFTC is appealing the court’s ruling.) Since then, the company traded nearly $200 million in contract value for people wanting to bet on the outcome of the political race, Mansour told CNBC on Monday. “The demand curve is truly exponential,” he said.
Kalshi rushed to boost its cash position in anticipation of additional betting on the U.S. election. Like most brokerages, the company offers instant funding to new users. This means users can start trading right away, even though it may take two to three business days for the funds to be officially transferred from the customer’s bank account to Kalshi’s.
Although investors suppose that Kalshi’s growth spike will subside after the election, they believe the company grew so much over the last month that it won’t revert to its prior size, the person said.
Since Kalshi won the ruling against the CFTC, other companies began to offer election contract trading for U.S. citizens. On Monday, Robinhood introduced a market for betting on the presidential election. Interactive Brokers also launched election contracts following Kalshi’s legal victory.
In addition to Sequoia and Neo, Kalshi’s backers include Y Combinator, Henry Kravis, and Mantis VC, a fund managed. The company raised a total of $106 million in equity capital and was last valued at $787 million, according to PitchBook data.
The music streaming app Tidal is laying off more workers. In a statement to Fortune, an unnamed Tidal spokesperson confirmed “the elimination of some roles across our business and design teams.”
On Wednesday, Fortune published a leaked memo from Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Tidal parent company BlockBlock Head, who said that the company is going to “part ways with a number of folks” on the team. “We’re reducing the size of our design team and foundational roles supporting TIDAL, and we will consider reducing engineering over the next few weeks as we have more clarity around leadership going forward,” Dorsey wrote, according to Fortune.
For decades now, I’ve been trying to reassure people that the coming robot revolution will not result in job loss for us humans. It’s a notion I firmly believed – or at least did until this morning.
Earlier this week, Boston Dynamics released a fresh demonstration video of its new Atlas humanoid robot (see below). Unveiled earlier this year, this Atlas is a wholesale redesign and radical upgrade from its already impressive and Parkour-performing original Atlas. This new robot looks a lot more like us, though it can move in ways that none of us can.
The latest video is in some ways unremarkable: Another humanoid robot performing drudgery tasks we’d rather not perform. In this case, Atlas is sorting plastic engine covers between a supplier container with horizontal slots and something called a “mobile sequencing dolly” with vertical slots. It does so in the drab environs of what appears to be some sort of manufacturing facility, though it’s probably just a warehouse in Boston Dynamic’s development campus.
What’s remarkable about the nearly three-minute video is that Altas is doing it all autonomously. That’s right, unlike the remote-controlled Optimus robots Elon Musk and Tesla tried to pawn off as self-directed at his “We, Robot” event, there is, according to Boston Dynamics, no one guiding Atlas’ motion or decisions.
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In the video, Atlas faces a cart full of plastic engine cover trays. The robot first reaches for one, placing its two ‘fingers’ underneath the cover, and then pulls it forward. Atlas then releases its grip and rotates its hand so that one ‘finger’ is on top and the other is on the bottom, grabs the tray, and pulls it out.
Viewed from a distance, you’d be forgiven for assuming you were watching a slow-moving human worker. Of course, the next bit would belie that notion. Atlas appears to walk backward toward the vertical set of tray holders but also twists its body around as it moves. As I said, it can do some things not possible with a human body.
Before inserting the tray into its new holder, Atlas appears to examine it. Later, we see an inset video feed that shows us how Atlas’s vision system is assessing the size and shape of the tray.
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Atlas continues its work, crouching and bending down to grab engine covers on lower shelves. It all goes smoothly, except for one moment when a tray gets caught on the fabric edge of one shelf. Instead of pulling it back slowly, Atltas yanks it back before smoothly inserting the part.
(Image credit: Boston Dynamics)
Like I said, not exactly compelling viewing except when you consider what this means. Robots are widely used in manufacturing and warehouses but they’re often not employed when fine motor controls are required and especially not in places that require on-the-fly decisions.
It’s clear from this video, however, that we’re on the path to where robots that look and work like us will soon stand alongside or replace factory workers. They’ll do the job as well as us but also be able to walk backward while turning their head around 180 degrees.
Plus, with the introduction of generative AI, robots like Boston Dynamics Atlas will be able to report on their work, respond when you ask them questions about production levels, and even join you for some witty banter at lunchtime (they still won’t eat but may plug in for an hour).
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So now I have to adjust what I tell people about robots: They won’t take our jobs yet, but in 10-20 years, you may be looking for another line of work.
Feedback is often both baffled and intrigued by the tricks advertisers will pull to try to sell things, but the latest gambit seems designed to wrong-foot: deliberately odd capitalisation and bad grammar.
During our time spent mucking around on our smartphone, Feedback has repeatedly seen ads for a mobile game that promises the “Hardest LEvel in the HisTory”. We have SPent days tRYing to Work out wHy it looks like thaT.
The game in question is called Go Climb! It is a puzzle game in which a group of mountaineers ascending a peak have got their safety lines tangled and the player must untangle them. So it is, essentially, the back of Feedback’s TV, except it has been gamified and is also at least somewhat possible to solve.
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Feedback initially wondered if this was a case of non-English-speaking developers skimping on translation costs. There is precedent for this: back in 1991, the Japanese space shooter Zero Wing was released in Europe with a notoriously shonky translation. As a result, in the introductory cutscene, an alien invader announced: “All your base are belong to us.” After this was rediscovered in the late 1990s, it became one of the most widely shared internet memes of the time.
However, a closer look at Go Climb! suggests something else is going on. It is made by a company called FOMO Games. The firm is based in Turkey, but its staff clearly have an excellent command of English, as evidenced by the information provided about all its other games, not to mention the gloriously corporate text on its website explaining that “FOMO stands for Fear Of Missing Out, which defines our product vision and culture.”
Instead, Feedback suspects the bad English is intentionally designed to get our attention. In line with this, the advert has other odd features that add to the off-kilter feeling. Notably, in it, the mountaineers from the game are replaced with astronauts in spacesuits drifting around against a starry backdrop, so the game’s title makes absolutely no sense. It was only when we looked at the game in an app store that the mountaineering theme was revealed and things became clear.
This seems to be a new and devilish way to advertise a product online: purposely make a complete hash of your ad and hope this intrigues people enough to get them to click through.
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And on some level it worked, because here we are. But Feedback hasn’t downloaded the game. On principle, we don’t believe in rewarding deliberately bad spelling.
Monkeys in politics
At the time of writing, the US presidential election is imminent and Feedback is trapped in an endless cycle of news stories reporting polls, pundits endlessly reinterpreting said polls, and then more polls. It is a terribly long-winded way of saying “we don’t know what’s going to happen”.
Now, our colleague Alexandra Thompson has highlighted an important new contribution to the field of psephological forecasting: a paper titled “Monkeys predict US elections“.
Sadly, this doesn’t involve placing an infinite number of monkeys into voting booths. Instead, researchers showed monkeys pairs of photos of candidates from senatorial and gubernatorial elections.
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The monkeys spent more time looking at the losers than at the winners. This seems like a peculiar form of torture for politicians: not only did you lose, it says, but monkeys stared at you judgmentally.
The study extended previous work showing that children can identify the winners and losers in elections based purely on photos of the candidates. Both the children and the monkeys were picking based on face shape, with square jawlines being the key sign of an improved chance of victory.
Who would do such a study? Three of the researchers are at the University of Pennsylvania, but the fourth is based at a Portuguese institution called the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown. Feedback isn’t quite sure what to make of that.
It does seem that unconscious factors play into our voting decisions. It is often claimed that taller candidates tend to win US elections, and there appears to be some truth to this.
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A 2013 study pulled data on all US presidential elections to date and found that taller candidates won more of the popular vote – although this didn’t translate to them being more likely to actually be elected. In what can only be described as double nominative determinism, one of the authors is a social psychologist called Abraham Buunk.
Readers who are invested in the outcome of the US election are hereby advised: whatever you do, don’t look up Donald Trump’s and Kamala Harris’s respective heights.
One more for the road
In such stressful times, like many people, Feedback has turned to the soothing alternative reality of The Great British Bake Off (The Great British Baking Show, if you are in North America).
There are all sorts of fascinating and delicious things to learn about the materials science of breads, cakes and biscuits, but we just want to point out that the show’s home economist, who produces all the sample biscuits, tarts and desserts for the technical challenges, is called Hattie Baker.
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