I really enjoyed reading Bella DePaulo's recent post. I, like Bella, am a big fan of Susan Boyle. I am a sucker for stories of the underdog exceeding expectations. I eat them up. I'm still not over the story of Paul Potts, who has a similar story as Susan Boyle. I also, like Bella, am not sure we are drawing the right lessons from Susan's story. It certainly would have seemed more sensible to describe Susan's appearance as interesting, unique, and creative than frumpy, homely, and frizzy.
The reality though is that we are an extremely looks obsessed culture. Bella is absolutely correct: The people we (at least initially) perceive as physically attractive seem to follow a very predictable pattern. They look like Amanda Holden (one of the judges on Britain's Got Talent) or this girl on the left (actual picture taken from the website hotornot.com where people rate others physical attractiveness based solely on a picture). There are most certainly evolutionary reasons why we (again, at least initially) perceive these individuals as physically attractive (although the media can without a doubt amplify these perceptions).
But there are evolutionary reasons why non-physical traits can also inform our perceptions of physical attractiveness. In a very interesting paper, evolutionary psychologists Kevin Kniffin and David Sloan Wilson point out that from an evolutionary perspective, even though beauty is an assessment of fitness value, the fitness value of a potential social partner can be influenced by both physical and nonphysical traits.
So in the spirit of Bella's worthy post, I'd like to add to the list a lesson we can learn from Susan Boyle:
Don't judge a person's physical attractiveness based solely on his or her physical attributes.
Seem counterintuitive? I'll explain.
One of the readers of Bella's post, SharonC, writes in her comment:
"And I'm sure that we all have met an "ugly" person who, as we got to know them, became quite beautiful in our eyes. I think the automatic preference for a certain type of young beauty is more or less hardwired but we still can see past it when we try."
I don't normally make it my business to respond to comments written on other bloggers posts, but in this case I could not resist since I really resonated with her comment.
I have definitely met girls who would probably receive a poor rating on hotornot.com who became quite beautiful in my eyes after some good banter.
On the flipside, I have also been in situations where I was really excited to meet a girl in person based on their picture, only to be disappointed after chatting with them.
Just to be clear: I'm not just talking beautiful on the inside. I am saying that in the former case, the girl actually got physically more attractive after hanging out with her, and in the latter case, the girl got physically less attractive after, well, only a few words.
This phenomenon is not just limited to a potential romantic partner. I have met many people (male and female) who I would change my "objective" rating of their physical attractiveness (either up or down) after learning more about them. This is important because, as Kniffin and Wilson point out, our perceptions of physical attractiveness can also be important outside of sexual relationships.
So SharonC raises a really interesting question, which can be empirically tested.
Can our perceptions of someone's physical attractiveness increase or decrease after we get to know more about their non-physical traits?
There is a series of really fascinating studies conducted by Kevin Kniffin and David Sloan Wilson on this very question.
In the first of a series of studies, participants rated the photographs of classmates in their high school yearbooks for physical attractiveness, familiarity, liking, and respect. The researchers then had strangers (of the same sex and roughly same age) who had never met the people behind the photographs rate the same photographs for physical attractiveness.
The researchers found quite a difference between the two sets of raters, which is to be expected if non-physical traits significantly influence ratings of physical attractiveness above and beyond physical traits. In general, the more the people in the yearbook were familiar, liked, and respected, the more physically attractive they were perceived to be.
Even though nonphysical factors made the biggest difference for women rating men, nonphysical factors (especially liking) still significantly influenced men's ratings of the physical attractiveness of women. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were also women in the sample who were heavily influenced by physical attractiveness. Therefore, even though gender stereotypes (e.g., men favoring physical traits more than women, women favoring non-physical traits more than men) were found at the group level (and are actually consistent with prior evolutionary theorizing and research results), there was a lot of variation within each sex. And most interestingly, the effect of non-physical traits on perceptions of physical attractiveness was still significant for both sexes.
The researchers give a really neat example of their effect. After a particular participant completed her rating, the researchers looked at the photograph of the male who she regarded as least physically attractive. To the researchers, and the strangers who rated this man, he did not seem ugly but actually quite average in physical attractiveness. When they showed her the photograph and asked why she rated him so ugly, her face was one of disgust as she explained what a horrible person he was. She was physically disgusted by the image of this guy, even though his horrible personality has nothing to do with his his physical features. This woman's perception of this man's physical attractiveness remained this intense, even after 30 years since last she had seen him!
While it is certainly possible that physical attractiveness colored the participants perceptions of the non-physical traits, the researchers point out that the causal arrow is most likely not operating entirely in this direction. "The fact that the other factors often explain much more variation than the stranger's rating therefore suggests that causal arrow runs at least partially from liking, familiarity, and respect to the perception of physical attractiveness."
In a second study, members of a university rowing team were asked after the training and competitions were over for the year to rate all other team members on the following dimensions: talent, effort, respect, liking, and physical attractiveness. The males on the team were also rated for physical attractiveness by a group of strangers about the same age as the crew members (the photo was a group photo).
As in Study 1, for both males and females, perceptions of physical attractiveness were heavily influenced by non-physical traits. Also, the ratings made by the strangers and the ratings made by the crew members who had information about the non-physical traits of the other crew members differed significantly.
As a vivid example, the researchers describe a male team member who was perceived as the slacker of the team and the main focus of negative gossip. It turns out that he was uniformly rated physically ugly by the other members of the team. In contrast was another member of the team, who worked so hard that there were discussions of him as a possible contender for the U.S. Olympic team. This guy was rated by everyone on the team as physically attractive. The most interesting thing is that this large difference in perceived physical attractiveness between the two crew members was not evidenced by the raters who did not know anything about the contributions of these two men.
In a third study, students in 6-week summer archaeology course rated each other on the first day of class on familiarity, intelligence, effort, liking, and physical attractiveness.
