Physical Attractiveness Biases Judgments Pertaining to the Moral Domain of Purity

Research on the Beauty-is-Good stereotype shows that unattractive people are perceived to have worse moral character than attractive individuals. Yet research has not explored what kinds of moral character judgments are particularly biased by attractiveness. In this work, we tested whether attractiv...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Personality & social psychology bulletin 2023-02, Vol.49 (2), p.282-295
Main Authors: Klebl, Christoph, Rhee, Joshua J., Greenaway, Katharine H., Luo, Yin, Bastian, Brock
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attribution
Beauty
Bias
Court decisions
Halo effect
Humans
Judgment
Morals
Personality
Physical attractiveness
Purity
Social Behavior
Social Perception
Stereotypes
Stereotyping
Violations
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Summary:Research on the Beauty-is-Good stereotype shows that unattractive people are perceived to have worse moral character than attractive individuals. Yet research has not explored what kinds of moral character judgments are particularly biased by attractiveness. In this work, we tested whether attractiveness particularly biases moral character judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity, beyond a more general halo effect. Across four preregistered studies (N = 1,778), we found that unattractive (vs. attractive) individuals were judged to be more likely to engage in purity violations compared with harm violations and that this was not due to differences in perceived moral wrongness, weirdness, or sociality between purity and harm violations. The findings shed light on how physical attractiveness influences moral character attributions, suggesting that physical attractiveness particularly biases character judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity.
ISSN:0146-1672
1552-7433
DOI:10.1177/01461672211064452