Maxims or myths of beauty? A meta-analytic and theoretical review

“Although judgements of facial attractiveness typically show considerable agreement among raters, even across cultures (Langlois et al., 2000), individual differences with respect to MHC type are also likely to be evident.”

“…shown to generate a broadly favorable impression of both male and female targets as more competent as well as more sociable (Eagly et al., 1991; Langlois et al., 2000), investigations of the traits associated with the sexy woman subtype suggest a stereotype that is a poor match for high-status…”

“For instance, an individual’s general tendency to see other people positively, which is likely involved in influencing levels of many distinct behavioral traits, might itself be influenced in predictable ways by environmental and biological factors ranging from physical attractiveness (Langlois et al., 2000), to the l…”

“Physically attractive people tend to have higher self-esteem, are liked more, and are perceived by others to be more interesting, socially skilled, and successful than those who are physically unattractive (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972; Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991; Langlois et al., 2000; Snyder, Tanke…”

“Thus, the null effect for male participants is not attributable to a lack of power or to greater variability in the data (for prior work showing the comparability of male and female attractiveness ratings for male and female targets, see Hönekopp, 2006; Langlois et al., 2000).”

“Because of beauty’s halo effect, attractive faces lead to a higher level of arousal and inferences of sociability and competence (Langlois et al. 2000).”

“For instance, attractive people are more likely to receive favorable treatment from others, earn higher salaries, and are expected to have better personality traits ( Langlois et al. 2000 ).”

“Although there is general agreement about who is attractive both within and between cultures (Langlois et al., 2000), evaluating physical attractiveness is partially a subjective judgment (Eagly et al., 1991; Monin, 2003).”

“attractive individuals tends to hold across cultures and ethnicities (Langlois et al., 2000), an important direction for future research is to examine whether these findings would hold with photographs of people of different ages and ethnicities.”

“…that `̀ beauty is in the eye of the beholder'' with the notion that the perception of the attractiveness of a given face is largely consistent between observers, regardless of their age, sex, or cultural background (Etcoff 1999; Langlois et al 2000; Thornhill and Gangestad 1999; Zebrowitz 1997).”

“It has been re-ported in literature that males and females generally agree on attractiveness [12,34].”

“P attractiveness influences numerous life outcomes and social experiences, and has been the subject of extensive research in the human behavioral sciences (e.g., Hamermesh and Biddle 1994; Mazzella and Feingold 1994; Langlois et al. 2000; Andreoni and Petrie 2005).”

“the commonly held view that good-looking people have other positive traits such as being independent, sociable, intellectually capable and interesting (Brigham, 1980; Langlois et al., 2000).”

“Several meta-analyses and reviews have found links, albeit weak ones, between attractiveness and real health (Feingold 1992; Langlois et al 2000; Rhodes 2006).”

“cultures (e.g., Cunningham et al. 1995) (see Langlois et al. 2000, for a meta-”

“A meta-analysis in psychology reviewed 1,800 empirical articles on beauty, ultimately including 919 in the published study (Langlois et al., 2000).”

“Of note, greater physical attractiveness has also been linked to some aspects of better social and psychological functioning (e.g., Langlois et al., 2000), so it would be interesting to examine the extent to which physical attractiveness plays a role in the links between psychological adjustment…”

“Preferences for the good-gene indicator traits described above have been almost always shown, whenever tested, to be relatively robust and consistent across cultures (Feingold 1992; Perrett et al. 1994; Penton-Voak et al. 1999b; Langlois et al. 2000; Penton-Voak et al. 2004).”

“There is only weak evidence to support such a relationship (Langlois et al., 2000).”

“Many studies have examined the role attractiveness plays in social judgment and the overarching conclusion has been fairly straightforward: In almost every context, attractive people fare better than unattractive people (Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991; Langlois et al., 2000).”

“Moreover, the numerous cultural interpretations of female beauty make it unlikely that what makes a woman beautiful can be firmly defined or that an attempt to produce a “norm” for attractiveness will succeed (Langlois et al., 2000).”

“In a meta-analysis of the relationships between adult attractiveness and various positive traits and life outcomes (Langlois et al., 2000), the strongest average effect size was r=.”

“portant facial feature (Langlois et al., 2000); judgments of facial attractiveness are fast, effortless, and consistent across subjects (Willis and Todorov, 2006).”

“Face preferences and perceptions influence important social interactions including partner and associate choices, hiring decisions, and voting behavior (e.g., Langlois et al., 2000; Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, & Hall, 2005).”

“Thus, unattractive people are evaluated and treated less positively by their peers than are their attractive counterparts and even have greater difficulty obtaining jobs (Hosoda, Stone-Romero, & Coats, 2003; Langlois, Kalakanis, Rubenstein, Larson, Hallam, & Smoot, 2000 ).”

“Two notable exceptions are research on facial attractiveness (Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991; Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986; Langlois et al., 2000) and research on emotion communication (Ekman & Freiesen, 1975; Rosenberg & Ekman, 2005).”

“…been reported by Adams, Kleck, Hess, and Wallbott (2004), Algoe (2000), Halberstadt and Saitta (1987), and Mignault and Chaudhuri (2003) for dominance; and by Downs and Harrison (1985), Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, and Longo (1991), Langlois et al. (2000), and Reis et al. (1990) for attractiveness.”

“The impact of beauty on social behavior has been well documented in the literature (Langlois et al., 2000).”

“…of facial attractiveness show a high level of agreement between individuals, across cultures and age-groups, as well as across the sexes is evidence that preferences for attractiveness may, at least in part, reflect adaptations for social bonding (see Langlois et al., 2000 for meta-analysis).”

“Does dressing provocatively increase objectification? What personal characteristics predict objectification? People overuse nonverbal cues when creating impressions, and frequently rely most heavily on physical appearance when formulating immediate judgments ( Langlois et al. 2000; Swim et al. 2001).”

“Three large meta-analyses covering over 1,000 peer-reviewed psychological studies of physical attractiveness confirm significant experimental and correlational effects on a broad range of social attitudes and behaviors (Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991; Feingold, 1992; Langlois et al., 2000).”

“Numerous subsequent studies have examined this stereotype (Bazzini et al. 2010; Feingold 1992; Langlois et al. 2000), providing extensive evidence that people robustly believe the association between a person’s physical attractiveness and general goodness and apply the beautiful-isgood belief in…”

“For example, psychological studies have demonstrated that adults (Langlois et al., 2000) as well as infants (Langlois et al.”

“On the basis of such studies it has been suggested that there exists a stereotype associated with physical attractiveness, famously – ‘‘What is beautiful is good’’ (Dion et al., 1972; see Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991; Feingold, 1992; Langlois et al., 2000 for meta-analytic reviews of research on physical a…”

“Although the relationship between attractiveness judgements and actual mate choice in humans may not be as strong as that apparent in other species (Bateson 1980; Kendrick et al. 1998), social psychological research over the last 30 years has demonstrated that physical attractiveness is a contributory factor to mate c…”

“It parallels research in face perception that reports high levels of interrater agreement on ratings of attractiveness and facial emotion across gender and culture (Ekman 2004; Langlois et al. 2000).”

“Several positive attributes are ascribed to physically attractive people: Attractive people are often considered desirable to be around, and attractive people report having different social experiences from those of less attractive people (Eagly et al., 1991; Feingold, 1992; Langlois et al., 2000).”

“…University of Cincinnati, USA. d Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, USA. speculated on the ways in which appearance elicits preferential treatment from others and shapes the social context in which individuals conduct their interpersonal relations (Langlois et al., 2000; Ramsey & Langlois, 2002).”

“Judgments of facial attractiveness are highly consensual (Langlois et al., 2000), reflecting preferences for visible attributes such as bilateral symmetry, quality of the skin, averageness or typicality, and secondary sex characteristics (Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999).”

“…evidence indicates that certain of these trait dimensions can be predicted from variations in RBP-enhancing phenotypic features such as physical attractiveness (Feingold, 1992; Langlois et al., 2000; Lukaszewski & Roney, 2011; Smith et al., 2009) and physical strength (Lukaszewski & Roney, 2011).”

“Not only do Caucasians rate Asian faces much the same way Asians do, but the same is true for the way Asians rate Caucasian faces (Cunningham Roberts, Barbee, Druen, & Wu, 1995; for a meta-analysis see Langlois et al., 2000).”

“2012) and universal standards of attractiveness based on health and fitness cues (Langlois et al. 2000) may be advertising protective immunogenetic diversity (Hamilton & Zuk 1982).”

“These brain substrates may account for the pervasive effects of facial attractiveness in social and political judgment (Langlois et al. 2000).”

“Our results on adult female judgments are consistent with findings from previous studies (eg Collins 2000; Langlois et al. 2000; Collins & Missing 2003; Feinberg et al. 2005a,b; see Introduction for full discussion).”

“…universal, culturally independent standards of beauty (Berscheid & Reis, 1998; Cunningham, Roberts, Barbee, Druen, & Wu, 1995; Jones & Hill, 1993; Langlois et al., 2000; Langlois & Roggman, 1990; McArthur & Berry, 1987; Singh, 1993)—large eyes, ''baby-face'' features, symmetric faces,…”

“In humans, features of an individual face deemed attractive to others are thought to be largely consistent between observers independent of age, sex, or cultural background.(1,2) Symmetric patterns are generally considered more attractive than asymmetric ones, especially when it comes to mate choice.”

“More recent work, including a meta-analysis of facial attractiveness preferences, found high consistency between people’s judgements of facial attractiveness within and across cultures, leading to the conclusion that ‘‘raters agree about who is and is not attractive, both within and across cultures’’ [4].”

“Another common assumption is that physically attractive people are also fundamentally good and therefore worthy of more favorable judgments (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972; Langlois et al., 2000).”

“years (Pettijohn & Jungeberg, 2004) and differ across cultures (Anderson, Crawford, Nadeau, & Lindberg, 1992), but other aspects, such as the determinants of facial attractiveness, show substantial cross-cultural agreement (Langlois et al., 2000).”

“[1] suggested that people regularly make judgements based on appearance and argued that “if humans were not biased to judge others on their appearance, they would not need to remind their children not to judge books by their covers” (p.”

“Studies reveal significant agreement among raters of face photos, even among raters from different cultures (Langlois et al., 2000).”

“Studies of interpersonal perception have pointed to a positive relationship between physical attractiveness and socially desirable characteristics, such as being intelligent, nurturing, ethical, or competent at one’s job (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972; Langlois et al., 2000).”

“Sociocultural messages about the importance of attractiveness often emphasize the social and material gains to be had by enhancing attractiveness; indeed, there is a great deal of evidence that attractive individuals accrue financial and social benefits (Langlois et al., 2000).”

“However, a meta-analytic review concluded that gender was not a moderator of the relationship between attractiveness and outcomes (Langlois et al., 2000).”

“It is possible and even likely that physical attractiveness influences liking, familiarity, and respect in addition to the reverse (e.g., Langlois et al., 2000, Watkins & Johnston, 2000; Rhodes, Halberstadt, & Brajkovich, 2001; Zebrowitz & Lee, 1999).”

“2004 and as the feminists cited above argue), while being judged by others as attractive or good-looking is more often associated with increased self-esteem (Langlois et al. 2000).”

“Even infants and young children show responses analogous to those of adults (Keating & Bai, 1986; Langlois et al., 2000; Langlois, Roggman, & Rieser-Danner, 1990; Langlois & Styczynski, 1979; Montepare & © 2012 American Psychological Association Correspondence concerning this article should be…”