Politicians Seen as Simpler than TV Stars

The results of the study: when people judged their own personalities or those of TV stars or sports heroes, they boiled things down to five factors. But when they judged a politician, it came down to just two: how energetic is he or she, and how trustworthy? Later, the scientists repeated their investigation in the United States, with similar results.
For helping us understand how we understand politicians, Caprara, Barbaranelli and Zimbardo were awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel prize in the field of psychology. Zimbardo later told a reporter from his home state of California (where Arnold Schwarzenegger is the elected governor): "Politicians like to think of themselves as so complex, but the electorate thinks of them as simple." [thanks, Sean]