A series of three studies found that individuals who believe they are physically attractive also tend to believe their social status is higher. The findings were published in Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology.
In modern society, physically attractive people enjoy numerous advantages in life outcomes compared to their less attractive peers. For example, studies show that physically attractive people are preferred as leaders, have higher income levels, and achieve better job performance scores. They receive more generous offers in economic games when paired with strangers (in research studies). Others perceive them as having a higher social status, and as being more trustworthy, intelligent, competent, and healthy.
This widespread positivity that physically attractive people experience is called “beautism.” Beautism refers to the cultural and social emphasis on physical beauty, elevating it as an ideal or standard of worth. However, previous research has most often focused on the effects of physical beauty as assessed by others. It remained relatively unknown whether attractive people themselves believe their standing in social hierarchies is higher simply because of their beauty.
Study author Lynn K.L. Tan and her colleagues sought to explore this question. They hypothesized that individuals who perceive themselves as more physically attractive would also consider themselves to have higher social status. To test this, they conducted a series of three studies.
The first study was a pilot study conducted on 303 U.S. Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers. Participants rated their own physical attractiveness and where they believed they stood compared to others in terms of jobs, wealth, and prestige. Participants in the second study were 349 adults recruited via Prolific. Similarly, they rated their own physical attractiveness, social status, and social likability on a set of short assessments.
The third study was an experiment in which the researchers manipulated participants’ perceptions of their own physical attractiveness and examined whether this influenced their self-perceived social status. The experiment was conducted online with 441 U.S. MTurk workers as participants.
Participants in this study were divided into three groups. The first group wrote a short essay recalling a situation when they felt more physically attractive than others. The second group wrote an essay about a time when they felt less physically attractive than others, while the third group, serving as a control, wrote an essay recalling their previous day. After writing the essays, participants rated their own physical attractiveness and socioeconomic status.
The results of the first study showed that individuals who saw themselves as more physically attractive also tended to view their social status as higher. The second study confirmed this finding and also suggested that part of the association between self-rated physical attractiveness and social status might be mediated by self-perceived social likability.
In other words, it is possible that individuals who see themselves as more physically attractive also tend to believe they are more socially likable, and as a result, perceive their social status as higher. However, the association between self-rated physical attractiveness and self-perceived social status is not fully explained by social likability.
The results of the experiment showed that participants who wrote an essay about how they were more attractive than others later rated their own attractiveness as higher compared to participants in the other two groups. They also tended to rate their socioeconomic status as higher compared to the other two groups. This finding confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis that individuals who see themselves as more physically attractive also tend to perceive their social status as higher.
“Our work provides complementary evidence for our main hypothesis that self-rated physical attractiveness causally increases first-person perceptions of status inferences. This finding has important implications for status navigation behaviors because of the lability of self-rated physical attractiveness in the modern world,” the study authors concluded.
The study sheds light on the importance of physical attractiveness in social relations. However, since the study relied solely on self-reports, there is room for reporting bias to have affected the results. Additionally, it remains unclear how stable or consistent self-reported physical attractiveness ratings are, given that the experiment showed they were relatively easy to manipulate experimentally.
The paper, “Hot at the Top: The Influence of Self-Rated Attractiveness on Self-Perceived Status,” was authored by Lynn K.L. Tan, Micha l Folwarczny, Tobias Otterbring, and Norman P. Li.
