Past research has shown that how people
rate their physical attractiveness is only moderately correlated with how they
are rated by others (r=0.24), suggesting that at least some people have little insight
into their true level of attractiveness, but a paper published in 2020 by Professor
Tobias Grietmeyer of the University of Innsbruck in Austria suggests that this is largely due to
self-perceived bias or perhaps even self-delusion by the most unattractive. In fact, the most
unattractive, as we can see in this figure, considered themselves on average to be just
below a six on an attractiveness scale of 1 to 9, so well above average, while in reality
they were actually rated as just above a 3, just above the bottom third of the rest of the
population. As you can see, this gap in perception narrows until above average participants
finally give an accurate rating of their own attractiveness, with the most attractive
people actually rating themselves as being lower than reality. Could this be driven by a
sense of unfairness, or mistreatment by others, perhaps? Well, no. The study also found that
the participant’s belief in how others perceived their attractiveness was also lower than their
actual attractiveness, suggesting either ignorance of what is perceived to be attractive at
best, and at worst genuine self-delusion. We’ll go into why this might be later, but
first we should go into why this concept might be familiar to some viewers.
Participants in Study 1 were 191 individuals (130 females, 61 males; mean age = 22.1 years -
include at bottom of screen for above para
This is because this study is very
reminiscent of the Dunning Kruger effect, which I’m sure many of you will be familiar
with, the idea being that there exists an innate cognitive bias whereby people with low
ability at a task overestimate their ability, with high performers tending to underestimate
their skills. The Dunning–Kruger effect appears in both cases but is more pronounced in relative
terms: the bottom quartile or 25% of performers tend to see themselves as being part of the top
two quartiles. It is usually explained in terms of meta-cognitive abilities. This approach is based
on the idea that poor performers have not yet acquired the ability to distinguish between good
and bad performances and they tend to overrate themselves because they do not see the difference
between their performances and the performances of others. This might be due to the fact that they
are not exposed to genuine ability through their workplace and friendship groups, so don’t know
what they don’t know. However, we surely can’t say the same for attractiveness. Even before instagram
models, adverts, and Qoves (I joke, of course), people are constantly being exposed to
objective beauty standards through fashion magazines and films. So why do we have
this phenomenon for attractiveness?
Well, this is what Professor Grietmeyer
sought to find out by employing six studies to find out how and why this ‘Grietmeyer Effect’ [to
coin a new term] exists. In study 3 for example, they examined whether the motive to perceive
oneself in a favourable light accounts for the tendency that unattractive people overestimate
their attractiveness. People typically exhibit a strong tendency to discredit negative information
about themselves (e.g., Ditto & Lopez, 1992; Shepperd, 1993), and studies have show that
affirming the self-concept may satisfy the motivation to protect one’s self-worth and thus
can counteract the biased processing of negative information about the self (Reed & Aspinwall,
1998; Sherman, Nelson & Steele, 2000). Hence, Study 3 examined whether unattractive people
would be less likely to overestimate their attractiveness after an affirmation of self-worth,
after inevitably saying ‘yes’ to questions like: “Have you ever been generous and selfless to
another person?”. Also, to address the possibility that people use those attractiveness criteria
that best serve their wish to be attractive, such as having a nice body to compensate for
an unattractive face, separate measures of the participant’s attractiveness of the face, body,
and overall appearance were employed. However, as you can see, nothing changed. Participants
were not employing confirmation bias based on a single aspect of their body, and nor
were they seeking self-affirmation.
Study 4 tried to correct for exposure
to different attractiveness levels, so participants were exposed to attractive or
unattractive people before rating themselves. It was hypothesised that unattractive participants
would lower their self-rated attractiveness (and thereby reduce the tendency to overestimate
their attractiveness compared to the objective ratings) after being exposed to attractive people
(compared to the condition where they were exposed to unattractive stimulus persons or the control
condition). In contrast, attractive participants should be less affected because there is little
discrepancy in attractiveness between themselves and the attractive stimulus persons. As you
can see, however, this also had little effect. However, interestingly study 6 did
something similar, although this time they allowed participants to select different
comparison targets to see if unattractive more than attractive people select unattractive
others to compare their attractiveness to. If not, then it could be likely that both
unattractive and attractive people may come to the conclusion that their attractiveness
level is similar to others, which could then explain the overestimation.
As we can see, though, unattractive people, rather predictably at this point, chose
unattractive people to compare themselves to. They also found that unattractive participants
rated other unattractive people as higher than attractive people do, with ratings of attractive
people being more uniform (the blue line). So it appears that participants are not bringing
others down for the sake of doing so, or to make themselves look better, but genuinely have
different standards lower down the attractiveness spectrum as a result of their own appearance.
In other words, they slightly modify their what they think are objective standards to suit
their appearance, and not the other way round. This isn’t pragmatic narcissism.
Another interesting note to add is that, although, as we mentioned, unattractive people
were more likely to choose unattractive people to compare themselves to, there were some
who did, which, as we can see in this graph, seems to have had an effect on their
rating of their own attractiveness. So this study has solved part of the puzzle.
But for the remaining gap, what can we say? Why do we have this discrepancy? Well, study 6 is
clearly the most revealing. Although participant’s choice of who to compare themselves to did not
have an impact on how unattractive participants rated their own attractiveness, the finding
that unattractive participants selected unattractive stimulus persons with whom
they would compare their attractiveness to suggests that they may have an inkling, albeit a
subconscious one, that they are less attractive than they want to be, or consciously claim.
Given that people tend to compare themselves with those who they feel are similar (as shown
by Wood, 1989), it appears that the unattractive participants realised that they had more in common
with the unattractive rather than the attractive stimulus persons. Even though the self-ratings of
the unattractive participants suggest otherwise, they seem to realise that they are less attractive
than others. Maybe this is purely an effect of the fact that this is a study, and thus they are on
the face of it revealing an insecurity of theirs to a group of anonymous researchers, and not to
someone that they can confide, like a friend. But even with this study flaw, this is quite
revealing. The prospect that they might be more honest about their attractiveness to a
friend than to an anonymous group of researchers suggests that they do acknowledge the
importance of attractiveness.
Whereas there is generally high agreement about
who is attractive and who is not, beauty is still to a small extent in the eye of the beholder.
There is relatively high agreement about the attractiveness of very attractive, attractive,
about average, and unattractive individuals, but there is still disagreement about who is very
unattractive, as shown by (Kanazawa, Hu & Larere, 2018), meaning that very unattractive individuals
are attractive to some. There are clearly some paradoxical advantages to being very unattractive.
For example, very unattractive women (not men) are more likely to be married than others, and
there is some truth to the claim that scientists are more likely to be taken more seriously if they
are unattractive, but that is for another video.
