Attractive people are expected to be more generous — and generosity makes them more attractive

A new social experiment has found that people expect attractive individuals to behave more prosocially. Those who expected attractive people to behave more prosocially also tended to judge individuals who behave prosocially as more attractive. The study was published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

Humans make judgments about others very quickly. For example, studies show that people need less than a second to form a judgment about whether another individual looks like a threat or not. Similarly, people very quickly form opinions about other people’s attractiveness, trustworthiness, intelligence, and many other important characteristics. Such snap judgments often form the basis of social interactions.

Attractiveness is one such important characteristic. Physical attractiveness is so influential that researchers talk about a “beauty premium”—the preferential treatment physically attractive individuals receive in interactions with others. Studies indicate that attractive individuals are perceived as more trustworthy, cooperative, and socially skilled compared to their less attractive peers.

However, since attractiveness is at least partly a subjective judgment, it remains unclear whether attractive individuals truly tend to possess all these positive traits, or if people simply perceive individuals with positive psychological characteristics as more attractive.

Study author Kajsa Hansson and her colleagues wanted to investigate the link between perceived attractiveness and prosocial behavior. They aimed to understand why people often rely on attractiveness to form expectations about the prosocial behavior of others. The authors hypothesized that attractiveness affects expectations of prosocial behavior (people expect attractive individuals to behave more prosocially) and that prosocial behavior increases perceived attractiveness. In particular, they hypothesized that people who expect attractive individuals to behave prosocially would also be more likely to find prosocially behaving individuals more attractive.

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Study participants were 249 individuals recruited via Prolific, with 53% of them being male. Their average age was 42 years. They completed the experiment in Qualtrics, which lasted approximately 20 minutes.

The researchers first conducted a pre-study in which a group of 100 participants played a Dictator Game. In this game, a participant decides how much money (or tokens), from a sum they receive, to give to another player. The other player has no influence over this decision. Giving money or tokens to the other player in this game is considered prosocial behavior. The researchers recorded how much each player behaved prosocially and created avatars that resembled these players based on their facial characteristics (gender, hairstyle, and eye color).

The main experiment consisted of two parts. In the first part, participants were presented with eight avatars (four male, four female) of participants from the pre-study and asked to guess how many tokens the participant represented by the avatar gave to the other player in the Dictator Game. Fifty percent of the avatars were attractive, and 50% were unattractive. The researchers wanted to know whether participants believed that attractive avatars gave more tokens to the other player, i.e., behaved more prosocially.

In the second part, participants were presented with medium-attractive avatars and information about how many tokens each of them gave to the other person in the Dictator Game. Later, participants were asked to recall how many tokens each avatar gave and to rate the attractiveness of each avatar.

The results of the first part of the experiment showed that, on average, participants expected players with attractive avatars to have given 46 tokens to the other player, while they expected players with unattractive avatars to have given 36 tokens. In other words, participants believed that players with attractive avatars behaved more prosocially.

The second part of the experiment revealed that avatars of players who gave more tokens to the other party were perceived as more attractive. On the 0-100 attractiveness scale, selfish players were, on average, rated as 45, while prosocial players were rated as 48. This happened even though all avatars in this part of the experiment were of medium attractiveness. Finally, the results showed that individuals who believe attractive people to be prosocial also tend to see prosocial individuals as more attractive.

“Taken together, our study reveals a fascinating link between attractiveness and prosocial behavior. We found that people often expect attractive individuals to behave more generously. However, the reverse is also true: generous individuals are perceived as more attractive. By discovering this bi-directional relationship, the study enhances our comprehension of the dynamic nature of human social perception, which is shaped by a mix of subtle cues, expectations, and biases. Understanding this can help us challenge our biases, leading to fairer judgments and actions,” the study authors concluded.

The study sheds light on an intriguing link between prosocial behavior and perceptions of attractiveness. However, it was an online experiment using avatars, and the prosocial behavior studied was simply the distribution of game tokens, which had limited real-world value for participants. If a study were to include rating real, physically present people instead of avatars and involved more demanding prosocial behaviors, the results might differ.

The paper, “The beauty of prosocial behavior: The bi-directional link between attractiveness and prosocial behavior,” was authored by Kajsa Hansson, Hooman Habibnia, Minou Goetze, and Susann Fiedler.