When beauty may fail

Abstract

The Dion, Berscheid, and Walster person perception study was quasi repli-cated in order to assess the generality of the "what is beautiful is good " stereo-type. In Experiment 1, female participants who were either unattractive, average, or physically attractive made a variety of attributions about female target persons of varying attractiveness levels. Attribution favorability was found to be contingent upon the physical attractiveness of the participant as well as the dimensions along which the attributions were made. While many of the attributions were congruent with the postulated stereotype, others were not. Socially undesirable attributions regarding vanity, egotism, likelihood of marital disaster (requesting a divorce/having an extramarital affair), and likelihood of being bourgeois (materialistic/snobbish/unsympathetic to op-pressed peoples) were reliably increasing monotonic functions of target persons' attractiveness levels. Plausible explanations for these divergencies were explored in Experiment 2. The work of Berscheid, Walster, and col-leagues (e.g., Berscheid & Walster, 1974) suggests that physically attractive as com-pared to unattractive individuals generally have a considerable social advantage. To account for why beautiful people might be preferred, Dion, Berscheid, and Walster (1972) postulated the existence of a physical attractiveness stereotype—"what is beautiful is good. " In the Dion et al. person perception study, participants attempted to estimate a…