Abstract
AbstractTennis and Dabbs (1975) reported that physically attractive males showed a positivity bias when rating the attractiveness of others. The opposite pattern was observed for females. We attempted to replicate and extend these findings by: (1) using self-assessed attractiveness rather than the experimentally derived attractiveness measure used in previous research, (2) using face-to-face interactions with targets as opposed to using photographs, and (3) examining the effect of another ego-involving attribute: intelligence. Consistent with previous research, attractiveness judgments made by men, but not women, correlated positively with their own self-perceived level of attractiveness (r = .51, p < .001). Attractiveness judgments made by women, but not men, correlated negatively with their intelligence (r = −.32, p = .001). Judgments of attractiveness are thus biased by a rater’s own attributes (e.g. attractiveness and intelligence), but these effects are not generalizable across men and women raters, ...
Highlights
Are people evaluated by the content of their character or by the beauty of their skin? If it is the latter, what impacts our judgment of one’s beauty? It has long been established that humans unwittingly evaluate others using a judgment policy that might be described as, what is beautiful is good (e.g. Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972; Feingold, 1992)
Participants who were exposed to photographs and video clips of attractive models and television stars rated subsequent targets and themselves as less attractive than participants who were exposed to unattractive others
Note: Intelligence is a composite of the Ravens Progressive Matrices, Otis Quick-Scoring Mental Ability Test, and a vocabulary test
Summary
Are people evaluated by the content of their character or by the beauty of their skin? If it is the latter, what impacts our judgment of one’s beauty? It has long been established that humans unwittingly evaluate others using a judgment policy that might be described as, what is beautiful is good (e.g. Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972; Feingold, 1992). Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991; Jackson et al, 1995), there is no doubt that whenever a person needs to assess or evaluate another human being, their judgments will be impacted by physical a ttractiveness regardless of its relevance to the attribute being judged. To the extent this is true, understanding the processes by which people judge the attractiveness of others is critically relevant to understanding how people evaluate others on everything else. Researchers have meticulously studied how attractiveness judgments and related outcome variables are influenced by recent perceptions of others’ attractiveness (e.g. Cash et al, 1983; Kenrick & Gutierres, 1980; Melamed & Moss, 1975; Weaver et al, 1984), few have attempted to investigate the individual differences that might exist in the attractiveness perception process (Tennis & Dabbs, 1975)
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