A recent study investigated how male facial attractiveness, vocal attractiveness, and expressions of social interest influence women’s decisions regarding fairness in economic games. The findings revealed that women were more generous toward men who had attractive faces, appealing voices, and expressed interest in them. The research was published in Scientific Reports.
Everyone likes beautiful things. People also prefer to interact with people who they find attractive. This creates the phenomenon called “beauty premium”. The beauty premium is the phenomenon where individuals who are perceived as physically attractive tend to receive advantages in various aspects of life, such as higher salaries, better job prospects, and more positive social interactions.
Research shows that others tend to see attractive people as more competent, intelligent, and trustworthy. In the workplace, the beauty premium leads to higher earnings and faster promotions for attractive employees compared to their less attractive peers. It also affects social dynamics, where attractive individuals experience more favorable treatment and social opportunities.
In research, scientists use two games to study the effects of beauty premium – the Dictator and the Ultimatum game. In the Dictator game, one player (the “dictator”) is given a sum of money and must decide how to split it between themselves and another player, who has no say in the decision. The Ultimatum game is more interactive: one player proposes a division of money, and the second player can either accept or reject it. If rejected, both players receive nothing.
Study authors Junchen Shang and Yizhuo Zhang wanted to explore the effects of attractiveness and social interest on decisions players make in the Dictator and the Ultimatum games. More specifically they were interested in how these would affect the decisions of female participants playing against males. These researchers hypothesized that attractive male voices and faces would activate the beauty premium making female players give them more money. They expected the same effect to appear if the male showed social interest in the female player.
The researchers recruited 70 female students from Southeast University in China, with an average age of 21 years. To ensure the participants were responding to realistic stimuli, the researchers carefully selected 32 attractive and 32 unattractive male faces from a larger database. They enlisted another group of student raters (who did not participate in the main experiment) to evaluate and categorize the attractiveness of these faces.
Additionally, 60 male native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were recorded reading two sentences: “I like you” and “I don’t like you.” From these recordings, the researchers selected 107 male voices and asked another group of raters to assess their attractiveness and trustworthiness, ultimately narrowing the selection to 32 attractive and 32 unattractive voices.
In the main experiment, the female participants played the Dictator and Ultimatum games as proposers, meaning they were the ones deciding how to divide the money. They were tasked with splitting 10 yuan (approximately $1.40) between themselves and a male partner, represented by a combination of a male face and a voice. The face and voice were shown for two seconds, after which the female player decided how much money to allocate to the male. Each participant played a total of 192 trials, with a random sequence of male face-voice combinations.
In the Dictator game, the results confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis. The women gave more money to male players with attractive faces, attractive voices, and those who expressed liking them. On average, they gave 3.35 yuan to men with attractive faces, compared to 2.68 yuan to those with unattractive faces—around 25% more. They also offered 3.10 yuan to men with attractive voices, versus 2.93 yuan to men with less appealing voices. The largest difference occurred when the men expressed liking the female player: they received 3.62 yuan on average, compared to just 2.42 yuan for those who expressed dislike, a difference of about 50%.
These results were mirrored in the Ultimatum game, where the female participants made similar judgments. They offered 4.52 yuan to male players with attractive faces, compared to 3.94 yuan to those with less attractive faces. Similarly, they gave 4.30 yuan to players with appealing voices, compared to 4.16 yuan to those with less attractive voices. Once again, social interest played a significant role, with participants offering 4.68 yuan to male players who liked them, compared to 3.76 yuan to those who didn’t. Even among men who expressed liking the participants, those with attractive voices received slightly more—4.80 yuan compared to 4.57 yuan.
When the roles were reversed in the Ultimatum game, and the female participants were in the position of recipients, social interest was the only factor that influenced their expectations. They anticipated receiving higher offers from men who expressed liking them, regardless of the men’s facial or vocal attractiveness.
“The present research confirmed beauty premium by showing that attractiveness effects from audiovisual channels are associated with decision outcomes. Female proposers offered more money to attractive-face males than unattractive-face males. Female proposers also allocated more money to males expressing positive social interest than males expressing negative social interest, whereas female recipients expected males expressing positive social interest to offer them more money than males expressing negative social interest. Under the condition of positive social interest, female proposers allocated more money to attractive-voice males than unattractive-voice males, while this effect was absent under the condition of negative social interest,” the study authors concluded.
The study confirmed the existence of the beauty premium and showed that a fictional face is sufficient to invoke it. However, it should be noted that the game involved a decision about a very small amount of money and participants were exclusively young, female students. Results with larger sums of money and on other demographic groups might not be identical.
The paper, “Influence of male’s facial attractiveness, vocal attractiveness and social interest on female’s decisions of fairness,” was authored by Junchen Shang and Yizhuo Zhang.
