Title:

On the Competing Roles of Attractiveness and Group Membership in Person Evaluations

Author: Tian, Laura
Department: Psychology
Issue Date: Nov-2017
Abstract (summary): Individual preferences notwithstanding, studies on physical attractiveness have suggested that people largely agree about others’ attractiveness and favor attractive individuals. Though this attractiveness halo represents one of the strongest influences over social behavior, psychological literature has documented other robust biases as well. For instance, favoritism towards members of one’s own group guide much of a person’s thoughts and actions. Here, I investigated what happens when these two biases collide by examining how attractiveness affects implicit and explicit evaluations of ingroup and outgroup members. I hypothesized that group membership biases would cede to attractiveness biases; participants would prefer attractive individuals irrespective of group membership. However, whereas the results of Implicit Association Tests showed that participants’ evaluations of ingroup and outgroup targets differed more by group membership, semantic differential scales showed that explicit evaluations differed more by attractiveness levels. A person’s attractiveness and group membership therefore seem to separately affect others’ evaluations.
Content Type: Thesis

Permanent link

https://hdl.handle.net/1807/97190

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