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Research done in 2010, the results of which were published in a paper called The Attractiveness Halo: Why Some Candidates Are Perceived More Favorably Than Others, found that attractiveness, including very specific traits like having what’s often called a baby-face—a smoother, rounder, youthful-appearing face—can influence voters’ preferences when they are exposed to photos of Congressional candidates for just one second.
The caveats for this and similar studies are important, and in this case, when you control for the perceived competence of the candidate (a judgement that, itself, is based on superficial outside assessment), the statistically significant attractiveness bias is almost completely cancelled out.
But it’s been found that we respond to aesthetics and make judgements based on those aesthetics before we make judgements about a person’s seeming level of competence, and other such measures of a person’s character.
Thus, it’s possible to make a snap-judgement about a person based on their looks and to have that initial aesthetics-based judgement influence future, downstream judgements—those that emerge a few seconds later, but also those that emerge after we learn more about them, their careers, and their platforms. The conclusions we arrive at after a mere second of appraisal, in other words, can influence our more complete, seemingly less-biased, future analysis.
There are facets of psychological, sociological, and economic study focused on identifying and measuring advantages enjoyed by people who are, by the standards of their time and culture, considered to be more attractive than average.
“Body privilege” is one term sometimes employed to describe this collection of advantages, though the term “lookism” has been more frequently employed of late, in part because it makes pointing out both the positive and negative implications of this bias a little easier: body privilege focuses on the advantages enjoyed by the attractive, while lookism can be employed to describe both that and the discriminatory behaviors and practices deployed against those who are considered to be less attractive or unattractive by the standards of the day in a particular location.
The lexicography of this space expanded further in the 1990s, when a group of writers and researchers explored how lookism manifested in the burgeoning and newly public gay, male sub-culture. One of the writers working on this subject at this time described a new term, “body fascism,” thusly:
“The setting of a rigid set of standards of physical beauty that pressures everyone within a particular group to conform to them. Any person who doesn’t meet those very specific standards is deemed physically unattractive and sexually undesirable. In a culture in which the physical body is held in such high esteem and given such power, body fascism then not only deems those who don’t or can’t conform to be sexually less desirable, but in the extreme—sometimes dubbed “looksism”—also deems an individual completely worthless as a person, based solely on his exterior. In this sense it is not unlike racism or sexism or homophobia itself.”
(Note the variation of “lookism,” spelled “looksism,” contained within that commentary. This is a rapidly evolving field of inquiry.)
A similar phenomenon is thought to exist throughout society, not just the homosexual male community, and research into this space has increased in scope and scale as we’ve come to realize just how much influence this bias has on a very large number of very important decisions that we make throughout our lives, and day to day.
To understand why something as seemingly superficial and unimportant as a person’s looks can be so important, though, it’s important to understand another concept, often called the halo effect.
The halo effect is named after the aura of light that often surrounds the heads of saintly individuals in European paintings. This halo symbolized the wearer’s goodness and properness, so those positive traits were essentially made visible through this halo: a visual that, with time, became almost exclusively reserved for angels, but which was a mark of overall saintly goodness in previous artistic eras.
The halo effect refers to the knee-jerk tendency to associate certain traits and feelings with other traits and feelings.
When applied to people, it might mean that we see someone who is dressed in a suit, who has a clean, nice-looking haircut, and who is physically toned, and we assume—without evidence—that this person is capable, confident, probably well-off, reliable, and perhaps even worthy of our vote, if they’re seeking it.
The halo effect, then, causes these physical traits—which have nothing at all to do with things like reliability and morality and other such, deeper human characteristics—to nonetheless be associated with them. That guy has broad shoulders and a nice watch, so he probably has better judgement and more impressive aspirations than someone who’s dressed like a slob, has bad posture, and who clearly hasn’t had a haircut for several months.
These assumptions make a tenuous sort of sense, in some cases, which is part of why they’re so pernicious.
It’s not entirely unreasonable, for instance, to assume that a person who looks put-together by the standards of our time and culture might make for a more reliable government representative than a person who’s got a stain on their t-shirt and who hasn’t tied their shoes. We tend to associate a competence for dressing well with other sorts of competence.
But you could dress an incredibly capable politician up in less-impressive clothing, and they, themselves, wouldn’t change. But our initial impression of them, and resultantly, our downstream assessment of them, might.
The aesthetics to which we’re responding are purely superficial, but the impact of our response can have a great many subconscious repercussions.
This superficiality is so effective at manipulating our reflexive reaction to people that there are entire industries predicated on dressing politicians and other public figures in such a way that they evoke the desired knee-jerk response from potential constituents. Celebrities are gussied up to maintain and elevate their brand, as are businesspeople, and even everyday folks, from high schoolers to septuagenarians: people of any age wanting to make a “good first impression” on those they meet.
Such effort is often a good investment.
Even when it comes to committing crimes, being considered attractive has been shown to result in more lenient sentences: at least in cases where the crime is unrelated to attractiveness (like burglary).
The opposite is sometimes true when the crime is attractiveness-dependent. A seduction-based swindle, for instance, may land an attractive defendant with a harsher-than-average sentence.
People who are considered to be unattractive by members of a jury face a reversed set of biases: they’re often given harsher-than-average sentences in general, but in some rare cases will be given something like the benefit of the doubt, especially when the crime is somehow related to physical attractiveness.
The one other data-supported circumstance in which people who are considered to be less-attractive are given something of a leg-up, by the way, is when their parenting skills are being assessed by strangers.
Research conducted in 1972 found that attractive people were thought to be worse parents than their unattractive peers—both groups judged by strangers who looked at their photos for a few moments before making their determinations.
All that said, the way these sorts of experiments are set up are arguably, at the most fundamental level, questionable.
Consider, for instance, that for almost all of these experiments, someone, somewhere along the way, has had to categorize people as attractive or unattractive. Or just as often, they’ve had to categorize people as attractive, plain, or unattractive.
There are many ways to attempt to make these organizational steps more neutral, but there’s no way to completely remove bias from that sort of aesthetic judgement: there’s just too much gray area, personal preference, and even regional- or age-related bias at play.
It’s likely that some of the “attractive” people in these studies would be considered unattractive by at least some of the research subjects. The opposite is also true: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and though it’s possible to generate a mental image of an archetypical “attractive person” in one’s own head, it’s a near-certainty that someone, somewhere, would not find that supposed archetype attractive at all.
Beauty, and even non-sexual appeal or charisma, is heavily reliant on cultural convention, tradition, who’s famous at a given moment, and countless other variables that are not controlled for in these studies.
Thus, a lot of the research done in this space can gesture at something approximating truth, but it’s likely that most of the data is distorted when it comes to specifics.
Go back to relevant work done in the 70s and you’ll find a lot of blatantly obvious (by today’s standards) aesthetic bias (or lookism, if you prefer), even in the final, published materials. But the more modern versions of such studies also make a lot of assumptions, even if they’re generally more careful with the words they use, and how they label and categorize people.
None of which is to say this isn’t a thing that’s happening, and isn’t a thing that influences the way we see the world.
It almost certainly is. And in fact, it’s wider spread than ever, with some of the most obvious and mainstream examples being non-human brands that benefit from the same halo effect as politicians and celebrities.
Part of the reason automobile brands invest in high-end concept cars and Formula 1 race cars that will never see consumer production is that it creates a halo effect for the rest of their products. You can’t buy that concept car, but you can buy something else that same manufacturer makes. And that sense of modernity, edginess, power, and cool emanates from such unattainable creations to those that are accessible by the masses.
Likewise, every time Apple associates itself with a hot, up-and-coming indie musician, or hosts classes at their stores, teaching people how to express themselves creatively, they amplify their halo. Their overall brand is resplendent of these desirable traits, and those traits then color our perception of everything they make: even their botched launches and imperfect products benefit from our reflexive response to them as a brand that is associated with a great many positive traits and other, also-respected brands.
If you taint someone’s halo instead of making it more appealing, it follows—according to these same somewhat-supported assumptions—that such negative traits would then negatively color other, perhaps unrelated aspects of the person or brand in question.
Some world leaders have been said to suffer from the so-called horn effect, which is the inversion of the halo effect; referring to devil horns instead of an angelic halo.
In 2011, The Guardian wrote about former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, for instance, indicating that it was almost impossible for someone like Chavez to get a fair, unbiased hearing for some of the good things he did for the country, because his every action is tarnished by the bad things that he did.
Part of the issue, for both halo and horn effects, is that most of us, most of the time, are prone to what’s sometimes called splitting—thought it’s more casually and commonly called black-and-white thinking.
Children and people with borderline personality disorder are especially prone to splitting, apparently, to the point where they may come to view individuals as two distinct people, depending on whether that person is being good or bad, based on the standards of the person doing the splitting.
This is thought to be a defense-mechanism which allows us to make ordered sense of an at-times confusingly nuanced world, when we latently prefer to sort our lives into good things and bad things—friends and enemies—so that our decision-making and defensive behaviors are less energy-intensive and more exact; less muddied by uncertainty.
This concept, too, is riddled with maybes, as much of the research is dependent on psychoanalysis suppositions, or predicated on other not-fully-supported concepts like transference—none of which is necessarily true or false, but all of which are difficult to convincingly prove or disprove.
Empirically, though, I think it’s safe to say that, to some degree, non-relevant attributes—perhaps especially those that we take in quickly and/or subconsciously via our senses, and those we filter through our emotions rather than rational analysis—at least partially shape our early assumptions and biases about people and entities (like brands), and in ways that are difficult to measure, protect against, or control.
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