From Scientific American:
When we walk into a voting booth and cast our vote, we like to think that we are making a considered decision, based on the issues. After all, a properly functioning democratic system, which gives its citizens the power to choose their leaders and shape critical policies, requires that voters are, for the most part, rational and that society can trust them to make sound judgments.
Perhaps partly for this reason, choosing competent leaders is considered too important to be left to minors, which is why most democracies only allow their adult citizens to vote. You wouldn’t think, therefore, that a group of children would be able to predict the outcome of elections in another country, based only on photos of the candidates. And yet, this is exactly what a recent study in the journal Science has found. The study, conducted by psychologists John Antonakis and Olaf Dalgas at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, shows that Swiss children as young as five years can predict which candidates are more likely to win French parliamentary elections.
More here.