Even highly antagonistic people find immoral peers physically unattractive

People who possess antagonistic personality traits, such as manipulativeness and callousness, tend to judge immoral individuals more leniently than the average person does. However, new research published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences suggests this leniency has definitive boundaries, as antagonistic people still find immoral individuals less physically attractive. This provides evidence that antagonistic individuals are fully capable of recognizing moral shortcomings but may evaluate bad behavior less harshly to protect their own self-image.

Antagonistic personality traits, sometimes called dark personality traits, describe a broad category of self-centered behaviors, including aggression, entitlement, greed, and manipulativeness. Individuals who score high in these traits tend to lack basic empathy and often act callously toward others to get what they want.

Most people naturally distance themselves from individuals who lie, exploit others, or ignore established social norms. This avoidance behavior serves a practical evolutionary purpose, as avoiding harmful individuals protects personal safety and preserves cooperative relationships. Yet, past psychological work has revealed a pattern known as darkness tolerance, which is the tendency for people with highly antagonistic personalities to judge immoral behavior less harshly.

“One question concerns whether this reflects a genuine moral deficit (i.e., difficulty distinguishing right from wrong) or something more strategic, like self-defensive reactions (e.g., not condemning someone that is similar to the self). In this study, we wanted to see whether this tolerance extends to physical attractiveness judgments, which are known to be affected by the morality of the target but are less self-implicating,” explained William Hart, an associate professor at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

For their study, the researchers conducted a detailed online experiment with 710 undergraduate students. The participants were told they were evaluating a local politician based on a short, random sample of non-policy interview responses. These responses were specifically designed and pilot-tested to make the fictitious male politician appear either highly moral or highly immoral.

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In the moral condition, the politician’s hypothetical answers conveyed deep humility, fairness, and a genuine respect for others. In the immoral condition, the politician’s statements strongly reflected arrogance, extreme selfishness, and a highly manipulative nature. Participants were randomly assigned to read just one of these two distinct sets of interview responses.

After reading the assigned interview, the students rated the politician on three specific evaluative dimensions to measure their overall impression. These evaluative dimensions included how much the participant liked the politician, how similar they felt to the politician, and their perception of the politician’s overall morality. Participants responded to multiple survey items for each category using numbered agreement scales.

Following these initial character ratings, the participants viewed a photograph of the fictitious politician. The scientists utilized pre-tested images of men who were generally considered by the public to be moderately attractive. The students then rated the politician’s physical attractiveness on a scale from one to ten based on how handsome and good-looking they personally found him.

Finally, the participants completed comprehensive, standardized personality questionnaires to measure their own individual traits. These surveys measured traits across a wide spectrum from agreeableness to antagonism, as well as tracking their basic levels of honesty and humility. By statistically combining these survey scores, the scientists could accurately determine each participant’s overall level of interpersonal antagonism.

The findings revealed that almost all participants rated the moral politician much more favorably than the immoral politician across every single category. However, the researchers observed a different pattern specifically among the participants who scored higher in interpersonal antagonism. Antagonistic participants evaluated the immoral politician less negatively in terms of likability, similarity, and morality compared to highly agreeable participants.

This specific result conceptually replicated previous scientific findings regarding the presence of darkness tolerance in general character evaluations. Highly antagonistic people reliably showed a reduced preference for the moral politician over the immoral one when making broad judgments about personality. Yet, this established pattern of leniency shifted entirely when the participants were asked to rate the politician’s physical appearance.

The researchers found that all participants, regardless of their own personality type, rated the immoral politician as far less physically attractive than the moral politician. The leniency that antagonistic people showed in their character evaluations completely failed to carry over to their physical attractiveness judgments. The highly antagonistic participants were just as repelled by the immoral politician’s physical appearance as the highly agreeable participants were.

“More antagonistic individuals are not broadly more tolerant of others’ immoral behavior,” Hart told PsyPost. “Instead, this tolerance appears selective to evaluations of immoral others (e.g., liking and morality), but they still show the same basic reactions as everyone else when it comes to evaluating more immoral targets as less physically attractive than immoral targets.”

These findings provide evidence that darkness tolerance is unlikely to stem from an inability to distinguish right from wrong. If antagonistic people truly lacked a functioning moral compass, they would have displayed the exact same leniency in their physical attractiveness ratings. Instead, the experimental data supports the idea that darkness tolerance acts as a self-protective psychological shield for individuals with dark personality traits.

Antagonistic perceivers can readily recognize immorality, but they may subconsciously soften their character judgments to avoid feeling bad about their own similar flaws. At the same time, basic physical attractiveness judgments might serve as an automatic, gut-level warning system for the human brain. This automatic visual response helps push both antagonistic and non-antagonistic people away from potentially harmful individuals before defensive rationalizations can take over.

While antagonistic people display leniency in certain situations, the researchers emphasize that this does not mean they actually prefer bad behavior.

“The data do not suggest that antagonistic individuals lack moral understanding or like people that behave immorally. They clearly showed a preference for moral vs. immoral targets on both evaluative and physical attractiveness judgments; they are just a bit more lenient toward the immoral targets on the evaluative judgments but do not like these targets more than moral targets.”

One potential limitation of the study is its exclusive reliance on a small set of photographs depicting male politicians. The scientists note that future studies should include a wider variety of images, situational contexts, and target genders to see if the findings hold true in different demographic situations. Another limitation is that the sample consisted entirely of young undergraduate students, which might not perfectly represent the general adult population.

The scientists suggest that future investigations should attempt to replicate these exact procedures in a highly controlled laboratory setting to ensure superior data quality. They also recommend using timed response tasks to explore exactly how quickly these specific attractiveness judgments are formed in the brain. Exploring these fast-paced cognitive reactions could reveal even more about how antagonistic people navigate their daily social interactions.

Beyond studying these rapid visual responses, the researchers hope to directly test the ego-defense theory. “We need to nail down mechanisms, such as the role of self-defensive processes in producing darkness tolerance,” Hart said. “For example, would darkness tolerance be reduced or absent if antagonistic individuals felt more secure in their worth?”

The study, “Not too unlikable but still less attractive: Antagonistic people’s tolerance for immoral others ends at evaluating their physical attractiveness,” was authored by William Hart, Braden T. Hall, Joshua T. Lambert, Danielle E. Wahlers, and Bella C. Roberts.