Judging attractiveness: Biases due to raters’ own attractiveness and intelligence

摘要

Tennis and Dabbs (1975) reported that physically attractive males showed a positivity bias when rating the attractiveness of others. The opposite pattern was observed for females. We attempted to replicate and extend these findings by: (1) using self-assessed attractiveness rather than the experimentally derived attractiveness measure used in previous research, (2) using face-to-face interactions with targets as opposed to using photographs, and (3) examining the effect of another ego-involving attribute: intelligence. Consistent with previous research, attractiveness judgments made by men, but not women, correlated positively with their own self-perceived level of attractiveness (r ?=?.51, p ??.001). Attractiveness judgments made by women, but not men, correlated negatively with their intelligence (r ?=??.32, p ?=?.001). Judgments of attractiveness are thus biased by a rater’s own attributes (e.g. attractiveness and intelligence), but these effects are not generalizable across men and women raters, and may be driven by different mechanisms.