The rules of attraction

We may not be living in the golden age of enlightenment a la Periclean Athens but we do like to think of ourselves as a fairly deep and thoughtful lot. In this age of understanding we go beyond the surface of things and look at the true nature of what is before us, don’t we? We wouldn’t judge someone by the way they look, would we? In fact, how attractive or otherwise a person is has a huge impact on how we judge their behaviour and that even permeates our judicial system.

This was highlighted in a new study that looked specifically at differences in how heterosexual women view attractive and unattractive men.

The study involved women viewing images of pairs of men, one attractive and the other not. The men although different in levels of attractiveness had essentially similar features. The men were viewed in the context of two written scenarios; in one case the man committed a major social faux pas and in the other did not.

In looking at how women rated the men in different scenarios they found firstly that when the man was depicted as being involved in a non-rule breaking situation there was basically no difference in how women reacted to and rated the attractive or unattractive man. However, when an unattractive man was portrayed as breaking a social rule he was judged much more harshly than the attractive man.

The psychological principle at play here is the “halo effect”, which holds that when meeting people attractiveness creates a generally positive feeling while unattractiveness creates a negative feeling. Any indication of bad behaviour by an unattractive person is therefore jumped on as justifying the innate negative feeling, which as well as being called the “negative halo effect” is also called the “devil effect”. When an unattractive man behaves badly you effectively get a “double devil effect” and he is judged accordingly.

The researchers point out that this type of judging has an effect on dating sites but much more importantly it also permeates our judicial system. Any man who stands trial has already violated social norms in some way, but research shows that if he is unattractive then jurors views will be doubly negative and he will receive a greater penalty than a more attractive man.

It looks like there is no such thing as “blind justice”.