Page 388 - The Social Animal

370 The Social Animal

stimulus person) prefer the highly competent person who doesn’t
blunder. 26
I want to emphasize that no sizable proportion of people, regard-
less of their own level of self-esteem, preferred the mediocre person.
I make this point because of a bizarre political event. In the early
1970s, when former President Richard Nixon was at the height of
his popularity, he tried in vain to appoint to the Supreme Court two
strikingly mediocre lower-court judges. In defending these nomi-
nees, Senator Roman Hruska argued (seriously, I’m afraid) that while
it was true that these men were mediocre, the mediocre citizens of
the country needed someone on the Supreme Court to represent
them, too! Our data do not support that argument.

Physical Attractiveness Imagine you are on a blind date. It is
near the end of the evening, and you are deciding whether you want
to go out with this person again. Which of your partner’s character-
istics will weigh most heavily: Warmth? Sensitivity? Intelligence?
Compassion? How about good looks? You guessed it!
Most people don’t want this to be true. We would prefer to be-
lieve that beauty is only skin deep and, therefore, a trivial determi-
nant of liking. Also, it seems so unfair; why should something like
physical attractiveness, which is largely beyond a person’s control,
play an important role? Indeed, when asked what they looked for in
a potential date, most college students don’t put “physical attractive-
27
ness” at the top of the list. But in study after study of their actual
behavior, college students, as well as the population at large, are over-
whelmingly influenced by another person’s looks. For example,
28
Elaine Walster (Hatfield) and her associates randomly matched in-
coming students at the University of Minnesota for a blind date. 29
The students previously had been given a battery of personality tests.
Which of their many characteristics determined whether they liked
each other? It was not their intelligence, masculinity, femininity,
dominance, submission, dependence, independence, sensitivity, sin-
cerity, or the like.The one determinant of whether a couple liked each
other and actually repeated their date was their physical attractive-
ness. If a handsome man was paired with a beautiful woman, they
were most likely to desire to see each other again.
This general phenomenon is not limited to a blind date. Gregory
White studied relatively long-term relationships among young cou-