Page 393 - The Social Animal

Liking, Loving, and Interpersonal Sensitivity 375

priate. The results showed that, when the crime was unrelated to at-
tractiveness (burglary), the sentences were much more lenient when
the defendant was physically attractive. When the crime was related
to her attractiveness (a swindle in which the defendant induced a
middle-aged bachelor to invest some money in a nonexistent corpo-
ration), the sentences were much harsher for the physically attractive
defendant.
Let’s pause for a second and take a deep breath. The Sigall–Os-
trove experiment is an important one, in itself, because it demon-
strates the power of physical attractiveness in influencing our
decisions. But, when thinking of our legal system, how seriously
should we take these data? After all, Sigall and Ostrove were not
dealing with trained jurists; the participants in their experiment were
only college students. Can we conclude from this experiment that
our legal system is so biased that physical attractiveness plays a role
in the sentencing of actual criminals? Are judges as susceptible to
physical beauty as college students? Chris Downs and Phillip Lyons
41
decided to find out. They scrutinized the fines and bails set by real
judges in actual court cases involving 915 female and 1,320 male de-
fendants being charged with either misdemeanors or more serious
felonies. What they found was interesting and somewhat comfort-
ing. Where misdemeanors were involved, the judges were much
more lenient with good-looking male and female defendants, assess-
ing both lower bail and lower fines than they did for relatively unat-
tractive defendants. But, when it came to actual felonies, the physical
attractiveness of the defendant made no difference.Thus, the answer
is that even trained judges are in danger of being influenced. But
when the crime is serious, their good judgment overrides the poten-
tial impact of this irrelevant variable.
The effects of a person’s physical attractiveness go beyond how we
evaluate or how much we are influenced by that person; it can also
change our perceptions of the people with whom he or she is associ-
ated. An experiment by Harold Sigall and David Landydemonstrated
that, when a man is in the company of a beautiful woman, he is per-
ceived differently from when he is seen with an unattractive woman. 42
In their study, participants who met a man seated next to an extremely
attractive woman tended to like him more, and to rate him as friend-
lier and more self-confident, than did those people who met the same
man when he was seated beside an unattractive woman.