Abstract
Both an opinion survey and an experimental study were conducted. The survey revealed that substantial majorities of those polled believed (a) that a defendant's character and previous history should influence jurors' decision (79%) and (b) that the defendant's physical appearance should not bias these decisions (93%). The hypothesis, derived from a reinforcement model of interpersonal attraction and previous research on physical appearance, was that attractive defendants would be more positively evaluated than unattractive ones despite the seeming irrelevance of appearance to judicial decisions. The results of a simulated jury task were that physically attractive defendants were evaluated with less certainty of guilt ( p < .05), less severe recommended punishment ( p < .005), and greater attraction ( p < .005), than were unattractive defendants. The importance of independent affective and cognitive components of the attraction process were emphasized.
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