Beautiful People Are Easier to Read

It seems that people are better at guessing the personality traits of individuals they find physically attractive, during brief encounters, concluded a new University of British Columbia study.

Professor Jeremy Biesanz, UBC Department of Psychology, who co-authored the study with PhD student Lauren Human and undergraduate student Genevieve Lorenzo, said that the goal of this study was to find out whether a person's attractiveness impacts on the ability of others to identify their personality traits.

So the researchers placed over 75 men and women into groups of five to eleven people, for three-minute, one-on-one conversations, and after every interaction, the participants had to rate partners on physical attractiveness, as well as five main personality characteristics – openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion and neuroticism.

Every person also had to rate their own personality.

Biesanz said that they managed to see whether people's perceptions were accurate or not, by comparing participants' ratings of others' personality traits with the way individuals rated themselves.

The researchers also added extra steps to control for the positive bias that can occur in self-reporting.

Even though the participants obviously had a positive bias towards people they found attractive, they also correctly identified their order of personality traits more accurately than for others.

“If people think Jane is beautiful, and she is very organized and somewhat generous, people will see her as more organized and generous than she actually is,” explained the Professor.

“Despite this bias, our study shows that people will also correctly discern the relative ordering of Jane's personality traits – that she is more organized than generous – better than others they find less attractive.”

The study also gives a reason for this and says that people pay closer attention to those they find attractive, and this is the perfect example of the advantages of perceived beauty.

Previous research concluded that attractive people were perceived as more intelligent, friendly and competent than others.

There are many reasons for which we tend to pay more attention to beautiful people, and according to the researchers, these reasons include curiosity, romantic interest or a desire for friendship or social status.

“Not only do we judge books by their covers, we read the ones with beautiful covers much closer than others,” added Biesanz.

This study was published in the December edition of Psychological Science.