social psychology

Question

Physical attraction stereotype refers to the tendency to perceive attractive people as having positive characteristics, such as sociability and competence.

True or false?

Answer 1

True! People who are more physically attractive in their society tend to be seen as smarter, more talented, or even more likely to succeed in life based off their good looks. Many psychologists believe that this is due to evolution. For example, our ancestors mated with others that they deemed attractive for various reasons, often times because they had characteristics that were good for reproducing or that were desirable for their offspring to have. Now, to survive in a pre-historic world, those humans who were deemed attractive had to have good characteristics, such as sociability and competence. That mindset was passed down as humans got more and more complex, causing us to eventually evolve to attribute good characteristics with attractive people even if we are judging them based off their looks, because of the same simple reason early human beings had; talented, attractive, sociable babies. Because of humans subconscious desire to reproduce healthy offspring and keep their blood line going (like many other animals), it is easier for us to give attractive people (or, for better understanding, people we want to reproduce with) the benefit of the doubt and assume they have other positive characteristics too. Of course this explanation is mainly from an evolutionary standpoint and their are very many other valid explanations from other psychological approaches as well.

Although we know logically that these characteristics have, usually, little to do with the attractiveness of a person, our subconscious almost automatically makes us attribute good looking people with good characteristics as well. This can be connected to and displayed by peripheral route persuasion. This phenomena is described as a persuasion method that uses factors such as attractiveness, star status, and similarity to persuade someone of something rather than actual logic or facts. This of course is just extra information but a good connection to have in your back pocket.