So ask the authors of a study just out in Psychological Science: Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover, Revisited. Their answer? People do tend to judge (female) books by their covers, but we shouldn't.
Psychologists Segal-Caspi and colleagues took 118 female Israeli students and videotaped them walking into a room and reading a weather forecast. Then other students - male and female - judged the 'targets' on attractiveness, but also tried to work out their personality, purely based on 60 seconds of video.
So what happened?
The judges judged prettier women as having stereotypically 'better' personality traits e.g. less neurotic and more friendly. Interestingly, both male and female judges did this, and there were no significant differences between the genders.
So there's a tendency to think that those we find attractive are also beautiful on the inside - but, that's all an illusion, say the authors. The targets were also rated themselves on personality, and these self ratings told a different story - there was no correlation between personality and average ratings of attractiveness.
There were however some small differences in self-reported values, with attractiveness being associated with valuing tradition and conformity, but not 'self-direction'.
So there we have it. Books, covers, don't judge 'em by 'em. It would have been better if this study had included both male and female 'targets', though, and the whole thing does rely on the validity of self-report, though no more than any other psychology paper.
The journal Psychological Science has been criticized recently, accused of publishing findings that probably aren't true and wouldn't be interesting even if they were. I don't think that applies to this, though.
On the contrary, this is the kind of study that psychologists should do more of.
The subject may seem crude, unsophisticated and not very 'scientific' but like it or not, it's one that people care about. Many people have strong views on issues like this (one way or the other), ones based essentially on hearsay, and personal recollections, i.e. on not much to speak of.
By addressing issues such as these, psychologists could really help to clear up some messy debates and damaging misconceptions.
Segal-Caspi, L., Roccas, S., and Sagiv, L. (2012). Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover, Revisited: Perceived and Reported Traits and Values of Attractive Women Psychological Science, 23 (10), 1112-1116 DOI: 10.1177/0956797612446349
18 comments:
I agree that this article presents some interesting correlations, but there are several problems with the interpretation.
Problem #1, the attractiveness ratings were made by the same judges who made the personality ratings, and each target was rated by just 1 judge. So you can't rule out judgmental halo effects driving the attractiveness-personality ratings. In fact those correlations could be driven by judges's perceiver effects, which are entirely independent of the target's appearance or behavior. See here: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/98/3/520.html A half-block design, where each judge rates multiple targets and vice versa, would have allowed those effects to be pulled apart.
Problem #2, the difference between significant and not significant is not necessarily significant. They didn't test whether the correlations of attractiveness with judged personality were different than the correlations with self-reported personality.
Problem #3, other people's personality ratings sometimes contain valid information over and above what is contained in self-reports. See e.g. Vazire's SOKA model.
Problem #4, "physical attractiveness" is not physical attractiveness. Here are the items, per the article: "We averaged ratings for the 7 items that directly assessed physical attractiveness: attractive, pleasant voice, fluent and cursive speaking, easy to understand, refined appearance, fashionable dress, and proportionate body (α = .72)." They made a composite of a bunch of things, including some purely behavioral items that are not what we conventionally mean by "physically attractive."
"On the contrary, this is the kind of study that psychologists should do more of.
The subject may seem crude, unsophisticated and not very 'scientific' but like it or not, it's one that people care about."
I don't think the the subject is crude, but the techniques typically are. An area of study that needs to move beyond the 1950s is the study of sexual consciousness. There is surprisingly little written about this outside the work of a few psychoanalysts and the novels of Phillip Roth. At this point I am wondering if there IS a serious way to study it and whether that will happen in my lifetime.
I have always thought, without any evidence, and only based on your writing that that you must be an ugly bastard son of a bitch. Can you please e-mail me a personal photo? No? Why?
Anonymous: Because, it would hurt your eyes and break every mirror in your house!
hardsci: #1 is a good point, although, I'm inclined to believe the beautiful-is-good correlation as it's intuitive and previously reported.
#2, the raw data look pretty convincing... but proper stats would help.
#4, is a bit weird, but it's still interesting as you might expect that some of those items would correlate with personality (e.g. less extraverted people might be expected to be less fluent & easy to understand).
Alas confounded, once posits a correlation between 'Physical Attractiveness' (PA) and 'Youthful Appearance' (YA).
Persons having PA also have a more YA.
Personality mistakes are more readily forgiven when the perpetrator has YA.
Put it another way. If you don't like someone's behaviour, then you'll kill them if they be ugly, and make a sex slave of them if they be fair.
This is exactly the reason why i think psychology is like astrology.
When they come up with nonsense like that. Sure there are shallow people, but there are also not shallow people.
Try the same test but now with only elderly persons. Prediction: elderly persons are more apt to judge character well regardless of looks.
All this proves that the people who setup this test should go and do some real work, because they stink at this.
Petrossa.me:
Why do I think that elderly persons are more apt to judge character depending on looks.
Isn't true that the look is a key factor that affected and still affecting humans evolution? So, ysomad?
Dude, have you read any psychology papers besides this one? You do know that the vast majority do *not* use self-report, right?
@Dawson: It depends on what you mean by "this topic". There is, for instance, the well-known study showing that attractive women are less willing to wait and more likely to complain about delays. And in general, there is a lot of work on personality and attractiveness.
I've read lots of psychology papers and even written a few. You're right that my statement was too broad, lots of them don't, but in this field & related fields most do. Granted lots of cognitive & perception psychology doesn't.
It was funny reading this paper, and then seeing the cover story of the December issue of Psychology Today.
I miss the humor or pun intended in the title.
Where is the relation to a book in all this?
Secondly, despite the recommendation of NS, the paper discussed here has not helped to increase my confidence for the papers in this journal. Better off spending time before an idiot box!
After all who are the Models here? Young alpha females of the species. So what does really make them attractive? Is it the personalty or the period of the month in their reproductive cycle and the type of pheromones they must be spreading into the air? Can the personality traits overshadow the reproductive characteristics in the exhibition of attractiveness of the female of the species? Ask Jesse, if in doubt.
One wonders if it is a Paper worth the paper it is printed on!
I agree with the idea of not judging a book by its cover. There are a lot of physically pretty people with the worst personalities. I have met a few not so attractive people who have the best personality and they become more attractive the more you get to know them. I think that psychologist should do more studies like this one. It is interesting to see that the majority of our population thinks alike.
Ben: Ah ha - I hadn't seen that when I wrote this! Well worth a read for a different perspective: http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201211/silent-signals/looks-and-personality
@Neuroskeptic: Psych has a very broad range of methods: eyetracking, self-paced reading, reaction time, priming, EEG, fMRI, MEG, NIRS, preferential-looking, habituation/dishabituation, grammaticality judgment, psychophysics, etc. Maybe 5% of what I read involves self-report questionnaires (I recognize this would be larger if I were a social psychologist, though certainly nowhere near 100%). Maybe we are using different definitions of "self-report"? I mean "providing judgments about one's own behaviors, rather than actually engaging in those behaviors" -- something like the personality self-ratings in the study you describe.
Not that there is anything wrong with self-report per se. One happiness researcher, when asked if he couldn't use a more "objective" measure than people's own happiness ratings, pointed out that any other measure of happiness is only called a measure of happiness because it correlates with people's happiness ratings. This is true of many methods, probably neuroimaging most of all.
OK, I think we agree mostly but are using different definitions. I don't call EEG, fMRI or anything like that to be "psychology", I call that "neuroscience". I think of psychology as being purely behavioural or cognitive. That's arbitrary. But by that definition, in my experience, a lot of it does use self-report.
If you define "psychology" as the study of behavior, any neuroscience that is relevant to understanding behavior is psychology. If you define "neuroscience" as understanding the operations of the central nervous system, then all psychology is neuroscience. I once heard a nice definition which was if you are understanding behavior, it is psychology, if you are understanding how the nervous system gives rise to that behavior, it is neuroscience. Sometimes fMRI is used essentially as an implicit behavioral measure (in which case it is psychology on that definition) and sometimes for brain mapping (in which case I don't know what it is) and occasionally it is used for looking at neural implementation (and is neuroscience, on this definition -- I don't think this is very common, though). EEG is pretty much always psychology on this definition.
But leaving aside fMRI, EEG, MEG, and NIRS, that still leaves a broad array of methodologies that are not self-report. If we go with the usual distinction of cognitive/social/developmental/clinical, self-report is more or less impossible in devpsych, and I hardly ever see it in cogpsych. I imagine it is more common in social and clinical, but I know lots of social and clinical work that doesn't use it. Where do you see self-report?
Self report you see in irrelevant studies mostly paid for by special interest groups or governments to 'prove' their point.
One of the The infamous Diederik Stapel disasters was caused by the special interest group for animal rights to 'prove' eating meat was bad.
But most psychology studies involve some form of selfreport, 'did you see ...' in the X, or 'how did you feel ... doing Y'. Whatever.
Psychology can only exist per definition by self report on some level.
What makes it it confusing is calling clinical psychology, psychology for example.
Clinical 'psychology' should be called something else so one can distinguish between scientific approaches to understanding human behavior and non scientific, such as social psychology.
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