A study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization found that the beauty bias is prevalent, though irrelevant in making accurate predictions of cooperativeness.
Attractiveness has been linked to greater earnings and overall economic success, with a beauty premium evident across genders and cultures. People perceived as beautiful enjoy an “attractiveness halo effect,” where they are often seen as more intelligent, healthier, better leaders, and more trustworthy. However, this can also lead to higher expectations and potential disappointment. Of particular interest is that there is mixed evidence as to whether beautiful people are more cooperative.
To further investigate this question, Adam Zylbersztejn and colleagues recruited 357 participants from Paris, Lyon, and Nice. This recruitment process was divided into three distinct stages. In Stage 1, participants provided photographs of themselves, and played an incentivized hidden-action game. They were randomly assigned the roles of Player A or B.
Player A had the option to either go “Go Out,” which would result in a five-euro reward for each player and conclude the interaction, or “Go In,” allowing Player B to determine the outcome of their interaction.
Player B, on the other hand, faced the following choice: they could roll a die, potentially earning 10 euros for themselves while subjecting Player A to a lottery, or they could opt not to roll, securing 14 euros for themselves and leaving Player A with no earnings.
Both players made their decisions without any knowledge of the other’s choice. The behavior of Player B was the metric of cooperativeness.
Participants in Stage 2 were tasked with assessing the perceived cooperativeness of individuals from Stage 1. Additionally, they provided their own photographs and engaged in the same game as the previous stage.
Lastly, in Stage 3, participants were asked to predict the cooperativeness of all participants from the previous stages. Alongside these predictions, they also provided beauty ratings and other evaluations for the participants. Notably, participants were not aware that the game was designed to assess their levels of cooperativeness.
Zylbersztejn and colleagues found that beauty is a key predictor of others’ cooperativeness, but does not actually predict cooperative behavior. A one point increase in beauty was associated with a 12 percentage point increase in ratings of cooperativeness; but this was not associated with observed cooperative behavior from the previous stage.
One’s own beauty was not associated with any differences in the beauty bias. In the author’s words, “beautiful decision-makers are neither more nor less inclined to believe that other beautiful individuals are cooperative.”
The researchers write, “Overcoming the bias seems particularly hard as even beautiful individuals (who could have learned about its faultiness) fall prey to it.” They call for rules and recommendations that would help individuals mitigate the beauty bias when making decisions.
The study, “How beautiful people see the world: Cooperativeness judgments of and by beautiful people”, was authored by Adam Zylbersztejn, Zakaria Babutsidze, Nobuyuki Hanaki, and Astrid Hopfensitz.