‘Pretty privilege’: attractive people considered more trustworthy, research confirms
Retrieved on:
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Beauty is not, as it is often assumed to be, “in the eye of the beholder” – but follows certain predictable rules.
Key Points:
- Beauty is not, as it is often assumed to be, “in the eye of the beholder” – but follows certain predictable rules.
- The fascination for the perfect makeup or skincare is fired up by the impact of perfect faces displayed on social media and enhanced by image processing and filters.
Pretty privilege
- Numerous studies have shown that attractive individuals benefit from a beauty bonus and earn higher salaries on average.
- Beautiful individuals are consistently expected to be more intelligent and thought to be better leaders, which influences career trajectories and opportunities.
Does being attractive make you more trustworthy?
- In our recent paper Adam Zylbersztejn, Zakaria Babutsidze, Nobuyuki Hanaki and I set out to find out.
- Previous studies presented different portraits of individuals to observers and asked them about their beliefs about these people.
- Each player’s payoff thus depended on their own actions and/or the actions of the other player:
If player A chooses “Left”, then regardless of player Bs’ choice:
If player A chooses “Right” and player B chooses “Don’t roll”:
If player A chooses “Right” and player B chooses “Roll”:
- To do so they were presented with the abstract choice scenario explained above while individually sat in a cubicle.
- If they decided not to trust, they were sure to receive a meagre 5-euro payout for their participation in the study.
- However, once an A player decided to trust their B partner, their fate was in the B player’s hands.
Does gender come into play?
- This implies that in our abstract economic exchange, beautiful individuals are more likely to benefit from the trust of others.
- However, when investigating actual behaviour, we see that beautiful individuals are neither more nor less trustworthy than anyone else.
- In other words, trustworthiness is driven by good old individual values and personality, which are not correlated with how someone looks.
Are beautiful people more suspicious of their peers?
- However, we might wonder who is more likely to fall prey to this bias.
- We constructed our study such that we could also investigate this question.
- Specifically, the participants we recruited in Lyon to make their predictions also had their photos taken.
- We thus knew how much they were influenced by the looks of others but also how conventionally good-looking they were themselves.
Astrid Hopfensitz ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.