Are attractive people more intelligent? Do they have better mental health? Meta-analyses have shown that people attribute these, and many other positive attributes, to those individuals who are viewed as “attractive.” When people don’t have enough information about another person, they can rely on heuristics, or “rules of thumb” to go by, which can cause cognitive bias. This stereotype, “beauty-is-good”, is a heuristic phenomenon in which people’s attractiveness is used as an indicator of other desirable traits. In this case, the stereotype can be explained by the halo-effect, which is “a cognitive bias in which the positive evaluation of one trait positively influences the evaluation of unrelated traits.” Researches wanted to look deeper into this phenomenon when it came to moral traits (vs non-moral traits), and if attractive people are seen to be more moral than non-attractive people.

Researchers conducted two studies. They recruited 504 American participants into the first study. In this first study, participants were shown images of attractive faces or unattractive faces with neutral expressions from the Chicago Face Database. The most attractive and unattractive faces of each sex and ethnicity were shown to the participants twice, once with a moral trait and once with a non-moral trait. The participants were then asked to rate how likely the person shown had that trait.

In the second study, 756 participants followed the same process as the first study, however using a different set of traits to rule out peculiar characteristics of the traits in study one. Also, the researchers wanted to account for the observed effect possibly being “due to differences in the traits’ warmth rather than due to differences in morality”, so they matched moral and non-moral traits on participants’ perceived warmth. (“Warmth is the extent to which a person is friendly, exhibits positive intentions toward others.”) Past research has shown that perceived warmth can be closely associated with morality.

The results of the study showed facial attractiveness strongly biased attributed moral traits, compared to non-moral positive traits. Participants also attributed more moral traits and positive traits to attractive people than to non-attractive people. Lastly, perceived warmth did not impact the results.

These results suggest that someone’s perceived moral character can be impacted by the “beauty-is-good” stereotype more so than other traits (intellect, organizational skills, etc). The researches note the limitation of the study was it was only conducted with Americans.

Original article: https://www.psypost.org/2022/01/attractiveness-biases-attributions-of-moral-character-study-finds-62366

Study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10919-021-00388-w