The Advantage of Attractiveness

• Attractiveness is an asset

• More attractive people are perceived more positively on a wide variety of traits, being seen as more intelligent, healthy, trustworthy, and sociable

• Attractiveness Halo Effect

  • Not only are attractive adults judged more positively than their less attractive babies are viewed more positively by their own parents, and strangers consider them more healthy, affectionate, attached to mother, cheerful, responsive, likable, smart

  • Teachers perceive attractive children as less likely to misbehave, more intelligent, and even more likely to get advanced degrees

• Attractiveness not only elicits positive trait impressions, but it also provides advantages in a wide variety of social situations

  • Attractive men and women become sexually active earlier than their less attractive peers

  • Attractiveness in men is positively related to the number of short-term but not long-term, sexual partners, whereas the reverse is true for women

  • More attractive people expect to date individuals higher in attractiveness than do unattractive people and actual romantic couples are similar in attractiveness

  • The appeal of attractive people extends to platonic friendships

  • More attractive people are more popular with their peers, and this is shown even in early childhood

  • More attractive job applicants are preferred in hiring decisions for a variety of hobs and attractive people receive higher salaries

• Facial attractiveness affects political and judicial outcomes

  • More attractive congressional candidates are more likely to be elected, and more attractive defendants convicted of crimes receive lighter sentences

• Body attractiveness contributes to social outcomes

  • A small percentage of overweight than normal-weight college applicants are admitted despite similar high school records

  • Parents are less likely to pay for the education of their heavier weight children

  • Overweight people are less highly recommended for jobs despite equal qualifications

• Vocal qualities also have social outcomes

  • College undergraduates express a greater desire to affiliate with other students who have more attractive voices, and politicians with more attractive voices are more likely to win elections

Advantages of High Attractiveness

• First impressions

• Mating prospects

• Parent and peer favoritism

• Education and employment

• Electoral success

• Judicial outcomes

What Makes a Person Attractive?

• Attraction is a multifaceted phenomenon

  • We are attracted to infants (nurturant attraction), to friends (communal attraction), and to leader (respectful attraction)

  • Although some facial qualities may be universally attractive, others depend on the individual being judged as well as “the eye of the beholder”

• Attraction is a dual process, combining sexual and aesthetic preferences

  • Women’s overall rating of men’s attractiveness are explained both by their ratings of how appealing a man is for a sexual situation, such as a potential date, and also by their ratings of how appealing he is for a nonsexual situation, such as a potential lab partner

  • The dual process is further revealed in the finding the different brain regions are involved in judging sexual vs nonsexual attractiveness

• More attractive facial features include youthfulness, unblemished skin, symmetry, a facial configuration that is close to the population average, and femininity in women or masculinity in men, with smaller chins, higher eyebrows, and smaller noses being some of the features that are more feminine or less masculine

  • More feminine, higher-pitched voices are more attractive in women and more masculine, lower-pitched voices are more attractive in men

• Features that increase attractiveness include a more sex-typical waist-to-hip ratio – narrower waist than hips for women but not for men – as well as a physique that is not emaciated or grossly obese

• Negative reactions to obesity are present from a young age

• A combination of features are required for high attractiveness

  • In the case of men’s attraction to women, a desirable combination appears to include perceived youthfulness, sexual maturity, and approachability

  • A single quality, like extreme distance from the average face, is sufficient for low attractiveness

• Attractiveness is positively related to smiling and facial expressivity, and there also is some truth to the maxim “pretty is as pretty does”

• Students are more likely to judge an instructor’s physical appearance as appealing when his behavior is warm and friendly than when it is cold and distant

• People rate a woman as more physically attractive when they have a favorable description of her personality

Hallmarks of High Attractiveness

• Youthfulness

• Unblemished skin

• Symmetry

• Averageness

• Femininity in women

• Masculinity in men

• Positive expressions

• Positive behaviors

Why are Certain People Attractive?

• There are more cultural variations in body attractiveness

• Although cultural learning makes some contribution to who we find attractive, the universal elements of attractiveness

  • Attractiveness is a by-product of a more general cognitive mechanism that leads us to recognize and prefer familiar stimuli

  • People prefer category members that are closer to a category prototype, or the average member of the category, over those that are at the extremes of a category.

    • People find average stimuli more attractive whether they are human faces, cars, or animals

  • A face morph that is the average of many individual’s faces is more attractive than the individual faces used to create it

    • Individual faces that have been morphed toward an average face are more attractive than those that have been morphed away from average

  • The preference for stimuli closer to a category prototype is also consistent with the fact that we prefer men with more masculine physical qualities and women with more feminine ones

    • Preference would further predict that the people who are most attractive depend on learning experiences, since what is average or prototypical in a face, voice, or body will depend on the people we have seen

• Reasons average stimuli may be preferred:

  • They are easy to categorize, and when a stimulus is easy to categorize, it elicits a positive emotion

  • We may be less apprehensive about familiar-looking stimuli

• All other things equal, we prefer stimuli we have seen before over novel ones, a mere-exposure effect, and we also prefer stimuli that are similar to those we have seen before, a generalized mere-exposure effect

• Consistent with a reduced apprehensiveness mechanism, exposure to other-race faces reduced neural activation in a region that responds to negatively valenced stimuli, not only for the faces the participants saw, but also new faces from the familiarized other-race category

  • Such a generalized mere-exposure effect could explain the preference for average stimuli, which look more familiar, although the effect may be more reliable for judgments of likeability than attractiveness

  • Whether due to ease of categorization or less apprehensiveness, the cognitive explanation holds that certain people are more attractive because perceptual learning has rendered them more familiar

• Origins of High Attractiveness

  • Cultural learning

  • Preferences for prototypes

  • Signal of mate quality

  • Overgeneralized reactions to disease or bad genes

• Evolutionary Explanation

  • Argues that preferences developed because it was adaptive to prefer those individuals

  • Good Genes Hypothesis

    • Proposes that people with physical qualities like averageness, symmetry, sex prototypically, and youthfulness are more attractive because they are better-quality mates

    • Mate quality may reflect better health, greater fertility or better genetic traits that lead to better offspring and hence greater reproductive success

    • Theoretically, averageness and symmetry provide evidence of genetic fitness because they show the ability to develop normally despite environmental stressor

    • High masculinity in male faces may indicate fitness because it shows an ability to withstand the stress that testosterone places on the immune system

    • High femininity in female faces may signal fitness by indicating sexual maturity and fertility

  • Can explain the attractiveness of youthfulness, since aging is often associated with declines in cognitive and physical functioning and decreased fertility

• Low body attractiveness, as indexed by overweight or a sex-atypical waist-to-hip ratio, also may be associated with poorer health or lower fertility in women

• More intelligent mates may provide better prenatal care

  • Since intelligence is heritable, more intelligent mates may yield more intelligent offspring, who have a better chance of passing genes on to the next generation

  • Attractiveness can be diagnostic of actual traits is consistent with another explanation for why we find particular people attractive

    • Anomalous Face Overgeneralization

      • Could equally apply to anomalous voices or bodies

• Evolutionary account typically assumed that as attractiveness increases, so does fitness, and it has emphasized the greater fitness of highly attractive individuals, as good genes effect

• Overgeneralization hypothesis argues that the level of attractiveness provides an accurate index only of low fitness

  • We overgeneralize the adaptive tendency to use low attractiveness as an indication of lower-than-average health and intelligence, and we mistakenly use higher-than-average attractiveness as an indication of higher-than-average health and intelligence

• It is important to recognize that whatever accuracy there is does not necessarily imply a genetic link between attractiveness and adaptive traits, such as health and intelligence

• One non-genetic explanation is an influence of environmental factors:

  • The quality of nutrition and that a person receives may have an impact on the development of both attractiveness and health

• Non-genetic explanation is a self-fulfilling prophecy effect

  • The higher expectations that teachers have for more attractive students may nurture higher intelligence, an effect that have been shown when teachers have high expectations for reasons other than appearance