A post by Hasagani Tissera
More physically attractive people tend to reap the benefits of being perceived in a more positive light, also known as the ‘what is beautiful is good effect’ (Dion et al., 1972). That is, their beauty spills over into other domains, eliciting more positive impressions across a variety of aspects. However, are more attractive people simply perceived more positively, or are they also perceived more accurately? People’s judgments of others can be both positively biased and accurate at the same time. For example, Ross might believe that Rachel is more warm and friendly than she actually is. However, he might also correctly realize that Rachel is more warm than friendly, accurately identifying her characteristic personality pattern. Our work focused on understanding if and how physical attractiveness influences the accuracy of personality impressions, complementing the existing work on attractiveness and positivity biases.
Research by Lorenzo et al. (2010)
Thus far, one study has examined the links between physical attractiveness and accuracy of personality judgments in the context of new acquaintances (Lorenzo et al., 2010). In their work, the authors disentangled two types of accuracy. Normative accuracy captured to what extent new acquaintances correctly perceived their interaction partners’ personality aspects that were similar to the typical person’s personality. For example, does Ross know that Rachel is more warm than anxious, which is also similar to how people generally tend to be? Normative accuracy is also thought to be a proxy of accuracy about one’s positive personality aspects, as the normative profile strongly overlaps with the socially desirable profile of personality (Wood & Furr, 2016). Distinctive accuracy, a more neutral form of accuracy, captures to what extent new acquaintances correctly perceived their interaction partners’ unique personality aspects that were different from the typical person’s personality. For example, does Ross know that Rachel is even more warm than anxious compared to the average person?
How were these two types of accuracy related to attractiveness? Lorenzo and colleagues found that people who were commonly found to be attractive, as per consensus, were perceived more accurately by new acquaintances in terms of both types of accuracy. In other words, people who were thought to be highly attractive by multiple perceivers, as indexed by consensual attractiveness, were perceived more accurately. As such, people who were generally rated as being high in attractiveness had their normative and their more unique personality aspects perceived with greater accuracy by new acquaintances. Going back to our earlier example, if Rachel is someone who people typically find physically attractive (i.e., high in consensual attractiveness), then people are likely to be better at accurately perceiving the normative and distinctive components of her personality.
Moreover, perceiving a person as being highly attractive, above and beyond their consensual level of attractiveness, was related to greater normative accuracy. That is, new acquaintances were able to better understand the positive and normative personality aspects of their interaction partners the more they idiosyncratically perceived that interaction partner to be attractive. More concretely, if Ross considers Rachel to be highly attractive, even more so than how their friends consider Rachel, then Ross is more likely to accurately perceive the aspects of Rachel’s personality that are similar to the average person’s personality.
Finally, perceiving a person as being highly attractive, above and beyond their consensual level of attractiveness, was also related to greater distinctive accuracy, but only for those who were deemed highly attractive as per consensus. In other words, new acquaintances were also able to better understand the unique aspects of their more consensually attractive interaction partners the more they idiosyncratically perceived that interaction partner as attractive. For example, if Rachel is someone whom everyone deems attractive, then Ross’ idiosyncratic impression of her attractiveness is positively related to how accurate he sees the distinctive components of her personality. The idea here is that more attractive people may be more socially confident and therefore, more expressive of their unique personalities. In turn, the new acquaintances who idiosyncratically believe these people are highly attractive may pay greater attention to these interaction partners, resulting in greater distinctive accuracy.
A replication and extension of past work
All in all, there is some evidence in the extant literature suggesting that attractiveness could be related to being perceived more accurately. Given that there is only one study examining this important topic, our work aimed to provide a direct replication using a much larger sample and to extend this work in several ways. For one, we considered a more reliable benchmark for accuracy. Indexing accuracy essentially involves comparing judgments of an interaction partner’s personality against some benchmark of that interaction partner’s personality. In addition to getting our participants’ self-reported personalities, we also obtained their close others’ reports of their personality. By averaging both self- and close-other reports of personality, we are computing a more reliable accuracy benchmark. Moreover, even though the normative and positive personality profiles are highly correlated, it is possible and recommended to distinguish them when positivity is of primary interest (Rogers & Biesanz, 2015; Wessels et al., 2020; Zimmermann et al., 2018). Therefore, in the second set of analyses, we utilized a more reliable composite validity criterion and parsed out the positivity from normative accuracy by subtracting the positivity means from the normative means. This allows us to have independent indices of each component and to attribute all of the positivity to the positivity index, as opposed to partialling out the shared variance. Lastly, we explored whether perceivers’ attention contributed to the associations between attractiveness and the accuracy of impressions.
Our study
To investigate whether physical attractiveness was related to accuracy, we recruited 547 participants who came into the lab in groups of 5 to 11 people. First, participants reported on their own personality. They also provided contact information of three close others who were later contacted to provide ratings of the participants’ personality. Then, they engaged in one-on-one meetings with every other participant, each lasting 2–3 minutes. Following the dyadic interactions, participants reported on their interaction partner’s personality traits and attractiveness level, as well as the participants’ engagement in the interaction. We averaged the attractiveness ratings from the various interaction partners each participant met with to obtain a consensual attractiveness score. Idiosyncratic attractiveness was interaction partners’ individual ratings of another participant’s attractiveness rating, after subtracting out that participant’s consensual attractiveness score.
Our results
What did we find? People’s consensual attractiveness was related to being seen more positively, but with lower normative accuracy. Thus, once positivity was removed from the normative profile, highly consensually attractive people were seen as less similar to the average person but in a positive way. This finding is consistent with other work parsing out normative accuracy from positivity, demonstrating that greater liking is associated with lower normative accuracy (Wessels et al., 2020). Further, people who were generally more attractive were not viewed with greater distinctive accuracy. Therefore, those who are deemed attractive by the consensus are not perceived more accurately, but they are perceived more positively, aligning with the ‘what is beautiful is good’ effect.
Furthermore, people’s idiosyncratic judgments of attractiveness were associated with more positive impressions, closely replicating the interpretation from Lorenzo et al. (2010). Normative and distinctive accuracy were not significantly associated with idiosyncratic attractiveness, suggesting that idiosyncratic judgments of attractiveness do not predict accuracy of impressions.
Although distinctive accuracy was not independently related to consensual or idiosyncratic attractiveness, replicating Lorenzo et al. (2010), we found that the link between distinctive accuracy and idiosyncratic attractiveness depended on consensual attractiveness. That is, people’s idiosyncratic or unique impressions of their interaction partner’s attractiveness were related to seeing their interaction partners’ personalities less accurately, but only for those interaction partners who were deemed as being low in attractiveness by everyone. Despite the different pattern of results across studies, these results may have the same underlying explanation. People’s idiosyncratic attractiveness may elicit greater attention towards their interaction partners, which should enhance distinctive accuracy at least for those higher in consensual attractiveness. This might provide more relevant cues about perception of personalities due to greater social confidence (Eagly et al., 1991). In contrast, paying greater attention to less consensually attractive people may reduce distinctive accuracy. Given that less attractive people may be less socially confident (Eagly et al., 1991), they may provide irrelevant or misleading cues, which could reduce accuracy if perceivers pay more attention to them. Therefore, the original study by Lorenzo and colleagues (2010) might have captured the higher end of this process, whereas the present study may have captured the lower end. Nevertheless, it is clear that the link between idiosyncratic attractiveness and accuracy depends upon consensual attractiveness.
Lastly, our analyses with attention suggest that people paid greater attention to those they idiosyncratically found more attractive. We also computed indicators of idiosyncratic and consensual attention; paralleling our analyses with attractiveness. We found that greater idiosyncratic attention was in turn related to lower distinctive accuracy for those who were lower in consensual attractiveness. In other words, paying less attention to a participant, above and beyond how much attention that participant generally received, was related to lower distinctive accuracy if that participant was deemed less attractive by the consensus. This seemed to be why consensual and idiosyncratic attractiveness interacted to predict distinctive accuracy. Therefore, paying more attention to interaction partners who provide irrelevant or misleading cues about their personalities may hinder distinctive accuracy.
Conclusion
Our findings support the idea that attractiveness relates to both distinctive accuracy and positivity of personality impressions. Specifically, it appears that what is beautiful to the beholder is good, but may be less accurately understood if beauty is objectively low. This could be because people pay more attention to those interaction partners whom they deem more attractive. However, this attention seems to backfire when those interaction partners are less socially confident and do not provide as relevant cues of their personalities, resulting in lower accuracy. Thus, the present research helps illuminate the links between attractiveness and accuracy and judgments and points to attention as one underlying explanation for these links.
References
Dion, K., Berscheid, E., & Walster, E. (1972). What is beautiful is good. Journal of personality and social psychology, 24(3), 285.
Eagly, A. H., Ashmore, R. S., Makhijani, M. G., Longo, L. C. (1991). What is beautiful is good, but.: A meta-analytic review of research on the physical attractiveness stereotype. Psychological Bulletin, 110(1), 109–128. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.110.1.109
Lorenzo, G. L., Biesanz, J. C., & Human, L. J. (2010). What is beautiful is good and more accurately understood: Physical attractiveness and accuracy in first impressions of personality. Psychological science, 21(12), 1777-1782.
Rogers, K. H., Biesanz, J. C. (2015). Knowing versus liking: Separating normative knowledge from social desirability in first impressions of personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(6), 1105–1116. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039587
Wessels, N. M., Zimmermann, J., Biesanz, J. C., Leising, D. (2020). Differential associations of knowing and liking with accuracy and positivity bias in person perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118(1), 149–171. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000218
Wood, D., & Furr, R. M. (2016). The correlates of similarity estimates are often misleadingly positive: The nature and scope of the problem, and some solutions. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(2), 79-99.
Zimmermann, J., Schindler, S., Klaus, G., Leising, D. (2018). The effect of dislike on accuracy and bias in person perception. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9(1), 80–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617703167