PHYSICAL ATTRACTIVENESS RATING

Physical Attractiveness & Personality & Social Rating

Abstract

The study here explores the possibility of a biased judgment of an individual based on his or her physical attractiveness. The study tests the fact whether an individual becomes favorable to a good-looking person and unfavorable to a not so good-looking person. The study tries to find out whether good-looking people are seen as more intelligent, honest, and come form a higher social class than people who are not as good-looking or unattractive. The study compares people's ratings towards a set of attractive (pictures that get high rates of attractiveness), and unattractive (pictures that get low rates of attractiveness) pictures of people in certain criteria like honesty, intelligence, and social class. The results of 100 participants rating 20 pictures in the four criteria; Physical Attractiveness, Social Class, Intelligence, and Honesty, were collected, analyzed and discussed.

Physical Attractiveness & Personality & Social Rating

Introduction

Introduction

This report was carried out to test whether physical attractiveness creates bias for the rating of other social aspects like social class, intelligence and honesty. A survey was constructed that allowed people to rate a set of 20 pictures on the 4 criteria mentioned above. The pictures constructed of 20 pictures (10 good pictures and 10 bad pictures) of 5 males and 5 females. The pictures were manipulated through makeup and a computer program Adobe Photoshop CS4 to make them either look better or worse in order to get better significance and results. 100 respondents from diverse background, ethnicity, and age are chosen randomly to complete the survey by rating the 20 pictures of good and bad pictures.

The physical attractiveness stereotype, in which attractive individuals are assumed to possess positive personality traits, has received extensive empirical support (cf. Feingold, 1992). Consistent with this stereotype, personality characteristics also have been attributed to individuals based on their body size and shape (Greenleaf, Starks, Gomez, Chamliss, & Martin, 2004; Hildebrandt & Walker, 2006). In particular, research has indicated that raters tend to use unfavorable terms to describe obese (e.g., slow, lazy, unfriendly) and thin (e.g., boring, stupid) figures, whereas middleweight figures are generally rated in a positive manner (e.g., friendly, funny, motivated) (Butler, Ryckman, Thornton, & Bouchard, 1993; Davis-Pyles, Conger, & Conger, 1990; Furnham et al., 2005 A. Furnham, K.V. Petrides and A. Constantinides, The effects of body mass index and waist-to-hip ratio on ratings of female attractiveness, fecundity, and health, Personality and Individual Differences 38 (2005), pp. 1823-1834. Furnham, Petrides, & Constantinides, 2005; Greenleaf et al., 2004). Overall, the existence of the physical attractiveness stereotype is well-supported, as both attractiveness and body size appear to influence assumptions made about one's personality characteristics and interpersonal functioning.

Although research has focused on the influence of attractiveness on perceptions of personality, evidence also exists to support a somewhat opposite notion—that personality information may influence the perceived attractiveness of an individual (e.g., Kniffin & Wilson, 2004). This line of research may be a relevant topic of interpersonal attractiveness, as rating the attractiveness of a target in the absence ...