Abstract
Research has found that attractiveness has a positive “halo effect”, where people tend to attribute socially desirable personality traits to physically attractive individuals. Several studies have documented this “attractiveness halo effect”, with most research using western samples. This study sought to examine the “attractiveness halo effect” across 45 countries in 11 world regions. Data was collected through the Psychological Science Accelerator and participants were asked to rate 120 faces on one of several traits. Results showed that attractiveness correlated positively with most of the socially desirable personality traits. More specifically, across all 11 world regions, male and female faces rated as more attractive were rated as more confident, emotionally stable, intelligent, responsible, sociable, and trustworthy. These findings, thus, provide evidence that the “attractiveness halo effect” can be found cross-culturally.
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Data Availability
The full data are available at https://osf.io/87rbg/.
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA) for collecting the data for this manuscript. More specifically, thanks to all of the authors involved in the article “To which world regions does the valence-dominance model of social perception apply?”. A special thank you to the PSA’s Secondary Analysis Challenge committee members who reviewed the submission by CB that was the basis for this manuscript: Benedict C. Jones, Lisa M. DeBruine, Christopher R. Chartier, Nicholas A. Coles, Patrick S. Forscher, Jessica K. Flake, and Abigail Noyce. Thanks as well to Danna Catalina Arias Quiñones (Franklin and Marshall College) for double checking output numbers and to the following for helping CB collect data in El Salvador for this manuscript: the Escuela de Comunicación Mónica Herrera, Directora Nicole Paetz, asistente María Erlinda Ávalos, and Luciana Chavarria Zamora (Franklin and Marshall College).
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Funding was received from a Psychological Science Accelerator award.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. For each testing site, approval was obtained from the local IRB, ethical approval was either not needed for this type of face rating task, or it was covered by preexisting approval.
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Batres, C., Shiramizu, V. Examining the “attractiveness halo effect” across cultures. Curr Psychol 42, 25515–25519 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03575-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03575-0