Page 394 - The Social Animal

376 The Social Animal

Taking all of this research into consideration, we must face the
fact that beauty is more than skin deep. We are affected by beautiful
people, and unless we are specifically abused by them, we tend to like
them better and we reward them more than less attractive people.
Once we have categorized a person as good-looking or homely, we
tend to attribute other qualities to that person; for example, good-
looking people are likely to strike us as being warmer, sexier, more
exciting, and more delightful than homely people. Moreover, in am-
biguous situations involving trouble and turmoil, beautiful people
tend to be given the benefit of the doubt. They receive more favor-
able treatment than less attractive people, and this “pro-beauty bias”
begins at a very young age.
The disconcerting aspect of these data is the strong possibility
that such preferential treatment contains the seeds of a self-fulfilling
prophecy: We know that the way people are treated affects the way
they come to think of themselves. Some evidence for this phenom-
enon comes from a classic experiment conducted by Mark Snyder,
43
Elizabeth Decker Tanke, and Ellen Berscheid. Put yourself in the
place of a typical male undergraduate in their experiment: You have
volunteered to participate in an investigation of “how people become
acquainted with each other,” and you have been paired with a female
student who is located in another room, ostensibly because the two
of you are assigned to the “no nonverbal communication” condition
of the study. Though you haven’t seen your partner, you have been
given a packet of information, which contains her photo. When you
proceed to have a conversation with this woman over an intercom,
do you think the physical attractiveness of the woman in the photo
will influence your impressions of her?
As you might suspect, the photo viewed by the male participant
did not depict his actual partner. For half of them, it pictured a very
attractive woman; for the others, it pictured a relatively unattractive
woman. But the photo did have an effect. The men who thought
they were talking with a beautiful woman rated her as more poised,
humorous, and socially adept than did those who thought they were
talking with a less attractive woman.This is not surprising. But what
was startling was this: When independent observers were allowed to
listen to a tape recording of only the woman’s half of the conversa-
tion (without looking at a photograph), they were far more impressed
by the woman whose male partner thought she was physically attrac-