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

“For instance, consistent with the “what is beautiful is good” stereotype [36], more attractive faces tended to also be seen as more trustworthy.”

“For example, physical attractiveness is a much stronger predictor of the rating of others than various behavioral patterns (Kennedy, 1990; Langlois et al., 2000).”

“Despite strong agreement as to what constitutes an attractive face (Langlois et al., 2000), women’s preferences for masculinity are subject to individual differences in properties such as their relative value on the mating market.”

“Parents may tend to minimize problems in their optimistic view of the child’s status, and teachers may be susceptible to the well-studied social bias associated with unattractive or anomalous faces (Langlois et al., 2000; Tobiasen, 1987).”

“This is reinforced by the fact that research has shown that people may be judged by others based on their dental esthetics; with poor dental esthetics in children and adults associated with lower intelligence, whereas adults with ideal smiles are considered more intelligent and have a greater chance of finding a job,…”

“Since humans have a tendency to ascribe positive qualities to people considered attractive, especially interpersonal qualities such as sociability and interpersonal competence [6,7], you may even be suggesting that you are less interested in being around the tired-looking person.”

“The current consensus is that, far from being in the eye of the beholder or only skin-deep, physical attractiveness is an objective and quantifiable trait of individuals like height or weight (Langlois, Kalakanis, Rubenstein, Larson, Hallam, & Smoot, 2000).”

“Physical appearance is also important more generally in person perception; good-looking people are judged more positively and treated more favorably in a wide variety of contexts (Langlois et al., 2000).”

“Some qualities, such as physical attractiveness, may be universally desired and have positive lifelong consequences for not only relationships but other life outcomes [19].”

“Researchers consistently find that people equate beauty with goodness and believe attractive individuals possess numerous positive qualities, but few negative attributes (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972; Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991; Langlois et al., 2000; Weeden & Sabini, 2005).”

“For instance, physically attractive people earn more money (Roszell, Kennedy, & Grabb, 1989), are more social skilled (Feingold, 1992), and have more friends and higher social status (Anderson, John, Keltner, & Kring, 2001; Feingold, 1992; for a review, see Langlois et al., 2000).”

“People’s physical appearance has a substantial impact on the way others judge and treat them (Langlois et al., 2000).”

“From an evolutionary point of view, preferences for certain facial cues as reliable indicators of health and genetic quality, can only be a coherent hypothesis if two conditions are met: (i) there should be agreement between people regarding the facial features that they find attractive (Langlois et al., 2000; Rhodes,…”

“It shows many similarities across cultures (Cunningham, Roberts, Barbee, Druen, &Wu, 1995; Langlois et al., 2000; Rhodes, Lee et al., 2005; Rhodes, Yoshikawa, et al., 2001).”

“Research consistently finds that certain characteristics are judged attractive across individuals and cultures [23], suggesting an adaptive function of attractiveness, with external features providing information about biological and social qualities that play a role in sexual selection [30–32].”

“In three separate studies, LaTour and colleagues found that men respond more favourably than women to nudity in advertising on key measures, including attitude towards the ad (AAd), attitude towards the brand (ABr) (LaTour and Henthorne, 1993, 1994) and ad impression (LaTour et al., 1990). This work was criticised by…”

“In contrast, when only one actor perceives the recipient in a particular way (i.e., a low consensus setting), a causal attribution is made about the actor rather than the recipient (e.g., Kelley, 1973; McArthur, 1972).”

“Despite our best efforts to remain objective in social situations, we do judge and treat others differently based on their perceived attractiveness (Langlois et al., 2000).”

“…up on Berscheid and Walster’s (1974b) suggestion that physical attractiveness matters in a variety of ways that go well beyond the romantic marketplace, for example, to children’s peer friendships (see Langlois et al., 2000, for a review) or to adult’s lifetime earnings (Scholz & Sicinski, 2011).”

“Many cross-cultural investigations have demonstrated high levels of interrater agreement in such judgments (Thakera & Iwawaki, 1979; Bernstein et al., 1982; Maret, 1983; Maret and Harling, 1985; Zebrowitz et al., 1993; Langlois et al., 2000).”

“…Langlois, & Roggman, 2002) and confer advantage in that attractive people are judged more positively, treated more positively, and display more positive behaviors than their less attractive peers (Langlois et al., 2000) across a variety of domains (Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991).”

“27 People are more involved in their interactions with physically attractive individuals, 28 which can lead to more accurate personality judgments of these individuals.”

“Researchers also argue that people (even teachers at school) tend to treat more attractive individuals more favourably (Langlois et al. 2000).”

“…a significant impact on our lives (Bull & Rumsey, 1988; Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972; Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991; Feingold, 1992; Langlois et al., 2000), including in circumstances as important as court trials, recruitment decisions, or political elections (Berry &…”

“Moreover, research findings from the field of psychology not only show that judges strongly agree about facial attractiveness but also indicate that a universal standard of facial attractiveness does in fact likely exist [38,39].”

“Two different meta-analyses of physical attractiveness research have shown that, contrary to common assumption, attractiveness is equally important for males and females (Eagly et al., 1991; Langlois et al., 2000), and one other meta-analysis found relatively few sex differences (Feingold, 1992).”

“associated with higher confidence, extraversion, and friendliness [35], users’ behavior conforms with the common expectations.”

“Hamermesh and Biddle (1994, p.1175) argue that: '…within a culture at a point in time there is tremendous agreement on standards of beauty'; and a standard finding in the beauty literature is that inter-rater correlations tend to be high (see for example Langlois et al., 2000).”

“However, the recent observations demonstrate that people in different cultures generally agree on which faces are attractive [9, 10, 11].”

“In a meta-analysis, Langlois et al. (2000) reported that studies in attractiveness research used different kinds of stimulus presentation modes (photographic images, video movies and in situ encounters), and these different modes might convey different types of information, which may subsequently…”

“A very comprehensive review of the literature is that by Langlois et al. (2000) which”

“The facial attractiveness stereotype illustrates that attractive individuals are assumed to possess positive personality traits and to be morally good (Dion et al., 1972; Langlois et al., 2000).”

“Langlois et al. (2000), discount the maxim, “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,” and demonstrate, as does Hamermesh, that raters agree about who is and who is not attractive.”

“High inter-rater agreement has been reported consistently for a number of social traits ([16,17] see also [18] for a meta-analysis on attractiveness), as well as across different demographic groups.”

“6 An important point here is that there is no substantial difference on beauty judgment between Indigenous and non - Indigenous raters , supporting the main finding of the beauty literature that people tend to have a general and reliable agreement over what constitutes beauty ( Langlois et al .”

“, social competence) simply because of their appearance (Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, and Longo, 1991; Feingold, 1992; Jackson, Hunter, and Hodge, 1995; Langlois et al., 2000; Snyder, Tanke, and Berscheid, 1977).”

“This research has repeatedly demonstrated that individuals who are less physically attractive are judged and treated less favorably than those who are more attractive (Eagly et al., 1991; Etcoff, 2000; Langlois et al., 2000; Sarwer and Spitzer, 2012a; Swan et al., 2018).”

“It is possible that physically attractive youth, who are often more interpersonally competent and socially successful (Langlois et al., 2000), may become dissatisfied with online relationships when they seek to maintain very large online friend networks, because they find these online relationships…”

“It is well established that physically attractive adults are perceived as having various positive personality qualities (e.g. Eagly et al., 1991; Feingold, 1992; Langlois et al., 2000).”

“Nonetheless, high consensus exists in what people report finding attractive across genders, cultures, and age groups (Langlois et al., 2000).”

“Attractiveness has been associated not only with being favored by others but also with a variety of other advantages, such as better social skills, higher self-esteem, and better mental health (Langlois et al., 2000).”

“First, it is well established in the psychology literature that more attractive people receive better treatment in a variety of settings (Hosoda et al. (2003), Langlois et al. (2000)).”

“However, other research has found no association between facial attractiveness and intelligence (Feingold, 1992; Langlois et al., 2000; Mitchem et al., 2015), or have even suggested that facial attractiveness hinders accuracy of intelligence judgements (Talamas, Mavor, & Perrett, 2016).”

“…(Cassia, Turati, & Simion, 2004; Pascalis, de Haan, & Nelson, 2002) and even demonstrate certain preferences based on facial attractiveness (e.g., Langlois et al., 2000) and group membership in domains like gender (Quinn, Yahr, Kuhn, Slater, & Pascalis, 2002) and ethnicity (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy,…”

“For both adults and children, attractiveness is also strongly related to popularity and to success (1).”

“Tel: + 31 24 361 5945, Email: m.vanleeuwen@bsi.ru.nl ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Imitating Attractive Others 2 Abstract People judge, evaluate, and treat attractive people better than moderately attractive or unattractive people (Langlois et al., 2000).”

“What influences the perception of attractiveness is subject to a large debate in which a wide range of factors such as body shape or personality are being discussed (for a review, see Langlois et al., 2000).”

“Many of these cues to youth and fertility are universally valued by men across cultures and time periods (Cunningham, Roberts, Barbee, Druen, & Wu, 1995; Jones, 1995; Langlois et al., 2000).”

“A Likert-type scale was used for rating the photographs because it is largely accepted in the psychology literature as the most useful rating method.(18,19) No specific information was given regarding the images they were about to see, except that the subject was a man.”

“important conceptual shift occurred during this period, with researchers moving from the belief that notions of beauty are arbitrary cultural conventions, to the belief there exist biologically based universal factors influencing perceptions of attractiveness (Etcoff, 1999; Fink & Neave, 2005; Langlois et al., 2000; L…”

“An esthetically pleasing smile is not only dependent on components such as tooth position, size, shape, and color, but also on the amount of gingiva displayed and the framing of the lips.(3) All these components form a harmonic and symmetric entity.”