Page 390 - The Social Animal

372 The Social Animal

all have regular features, small pert noses, big eyes, shapely lips,
blemish-free complexions, and slim athletic bodies.They all look like
Barbie and Ken dolls. And how are the wicked stepmothers, stepsis-
ters, giants, trolls, and evil queens depicted?
Television clearly sustains these cultural standards; with few ex-
ceptions, actors who fit the American stereotype of beauty are care-
fully selected to play the heroines and heroes of popular TV soap
operas and prime-time sitcoms. And then there are the commercials.
Anyone who watches a fair amount of television is subjected to a
continuous flow of propaganda aimed at selling the idea of beauty in
a bottle. Shampoo, skin lotion, deodorant, toothpaste, and exercise
machines are all peddled by promoting the conviction that these
products will make us beautiful, desirable, and ultimately successful.
And exposure to this kind of thing does have an impact. For exam-
ple, in one experiment, young women between the ages of 16 and 18
were systematically exposed to some 15 TV commercials extolling
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the virtues of beauty preparations. A control group of teenagers was
shown 15 commercials unrelated to beauty products. Sometime later,
all of the young women were asked to rank the relative importance
of 10 attributes, including sex appeal, intelligence, a pretty face, and
industriousness. The young women who had been shown the beauty
ads were more likely than the control group to consider beauty-ori-
ented attributes more important than other qualities.
Even as early as nursery school, children respond to the attrac-
tiveness of their peers. In one study, Karen Dion and Ellen
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Bersheid, had several independent judges (graduate students) rate
the attractiveness of nursery-school children. Then they determined
who liked whom among the children themselves. They found that
attractiveness was very important, especially for the boys: The good-
looking boys were liked better than the unattractive boys. Moreover,
unattractive boys were considered more aggressive than their attrac-
tive counterparts, and when the children were asked to name the
classmates who “scared them,” they tended to nominate the unattrac-
tive children. Of course, it might have been the case that the less at-
tractive children actually behaved more aggressively. In this study, the
researchers did not observe the actual behavior of the children in the
nursery school, so they could not test that possibility.
But we have independent evidence that people tend to attribute
less blame to beautiful children, even when the children are misbe-