Physical attractiveness stereotype - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The physical attractiveness stereotype is a term that psychologist

Psychologist

Psychologist is a professional or academic title used by individuals who are either:* Clinical professionals who work with patients in a variety of therapeutic contexts .* Scientists conducting psychological research or teaching psychology in a college...

s use to refer to the tendency to assume that people who are physically attractive

Physical attractiveness

Physical attractiveness refers to a person's physical traits which are perceived to be aesthetically pleasing or beautiful. The term often implies sexual attractiveness or desirability, but can also be distinct from the two; for example, humans may regard the young as attractive for various...

also possess other socially desirable personality traits.

Many studies (Dion et al., 1972; Miller, 1970) have found that people tend to think that more attractive people are also happier, outgoing, successful, kinder and have many other positive traits. In less-individualistic culture

Culture

Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...

s, beautiful people are assumed to have traits that those cultures value, such as concern for others, loyalty and integrity. (Dion et al., 1972） This can be seen in myths and fairy tales as well as films throughout history. The 'goodies' are young and beautiful whereas the 'baddies' are ugly.

The stereotype acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy

Self-fulfilling prophecy

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior. Although examples of such prophecies can be found in literature as far back as ancient Greece and...

where the perception of attractive people as more valuable members of society leads to their receiving preferential treatment, positive feedback

Feedback

Feedback describes the situation when output from an event or phenomenon in the past will influence an occurrence or occurrences of the same Feedback describes the situation when output from (or information about the result of) an event or phenomenon in the past will influence an occurrence or...

and tangible benefit. Studies have found that attractiveness does correlate positively with some traits such as personal income

Income

Income is the consumption and savings opportunity gained by an entity within a specified time frame, which is generally expressed in monetary terms. However, for households and individuals, "income is the sum of all the wages, salaries, profits, interests payments, rents and other forms of earnings...

, social skills

Social skills

A social skill is any skill facilitating interaction and communication with others. Social rules and relations are created, communicated, and changed in verbal and nonverbal ways. The process of learning such skills is called socialization...

and self-confidence

Self-confidence

The socio-psychological concept of self-confidence relates to self-assuredness in one's personal judgment, ability, power, etc., sometimes manifested excessively.Being confident in yourself is infectious if you present yourself well, others will want to follow in your foot steps towards...

. This cognitive bias

Cognitive bias

A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable...

could be considered to be a specific kind of halo effect

Halo effect

The halo effect is a cognitive bias whereby one trait influences another trait or traits of that person or object. This is very common among physically attractiveness...

.

Physical attractiveness can have a significant effect on how people are judged in terms of employment or social opportunities, friendship, sexual behavior, and marriage. In many cases, humans attribute positive characteristics, such as intelligence and honesty, to attractive people without consciously realizing it.
However, there is this positive correlation between physical attractiveness and intelligence. Study done by Kanazawa in Britain found that after controlling factors such as race, social class, body type and health, beautiful man on average has an IQ score about 13.6 higher than the average looking man. While beautiful women have an IQ score about 11.4 higher than the average looking woman. This correlation also holds true in US, although to a lesser extend. Statics show that intelligence have a stronger correlation with physical appearance than other factors, and it seems that physical appearance correlate stronger in man's intelligence than in women's intelligence. Furthermore, Kanazawa suggested that there might be an examination for this phenomenon. Intelligent men are more likely to be financially successful than their average counterpart. Wealthy men are more likely to marry beautiful women and given that both intelligence and physical appearance are more inheritable. Their children are more likely to be both beautiful and intelligent.

Study done by Pfeifer*ab also noted a positive correlation between physical appearance and wages. More attractive people are, on average, more likely to be employed and have a higher wage than their normal counterpart. According to this study, the estimated effects of the interviewer rating, generally, have a larger impact on men than for on women, while self-ratings (of attractiveness) have a larger effect on women than on men. However, it should be noted that, in this study, the rating from others (in this case, the interviewer) have a larger effect than self-rating. "The wage effects of attractiveness are nonlinear for men, which implies that wage punishment for unattractiveness is larger than wage premium for attractiveness, and linear for women."
In certain instances, physical attractiveness is distinct from sexual attraction; humans may regard the young as attractive for various reasons, for example, but without sexual attraction.

Women, on average, tend to be attracted to men who are slightly taller and who have a relatively narrow waist and broad shoulders. Men, overall, tend to be attracted by women who are slightly shorter, have a youthful appearance and exhibit features such as a symmetrical face, full breasts, full lips, and a low waist-hip ratio.

Generally, physical attraction is dependent on three factors: universal perceptions common to all human culture

Culture

s, cultural and social

Society

A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...

aspects, and individual subjective preferences. Despite universally held perceptions of beauty in both sex

Sex

In biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialization of organisms into a male or female variety . Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents...

es, males tend to place significantly higher value on physical appearance in a partner than women do. This can be explained by evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...

as a consequence of ancestral humans who selected partners based on secondary sexual characteristics, as well as general indicators of fitness (for example, symmetrical features) enjoying greater reproductive success as a result of higher fertility in those partners, although a male's ability to provide resources for offspring was likely signalled less by physical features. This is because the most prominent indicator of fertility in women is youth, while the traits in a man that enhance reproductive success are proxies for his ability to accrue resources and protect. There appear to be universal standards regarding attractiveness both within and across cultures and ethnic groups.

See also