, the present research addresses the idea that objectively unattractive individuals are not aware of their own (un)attractiveness. Relative to how they are rated by others, unattractive people should overestimate their attractiveness. Attractive people, in contrast, should not over‐ but may even underestimate their attractiveness. Previous research into whether people have accurate or inaccurate views of their own attractiveness provided mixed evidence, with some research suggesting that people are mostly aware of how attractive they are seen by others (Marcus & Miller, 2003) and other findings suggesting that there is little consensus between self‐assessed attractiveness and ratings by others and that unattractive people in particular overestimate their attractiveness (Gurman & Balban, 1990). Hence, I deemed it important to provide a comprehensive test of the idea that unattractive more than attractive people overestimate their attractiveness.
The present research also addressed why unattractive people overestimate their attractiveness. As just noted, incompetent people lack the metacognitive skills that are needed to recognize their own incompetence. Relatedly, it was examined whether unattractive people would have less general insight into who is attractive and who is not. It might be that unattractive people have a different beauty ideal than do attractive people and thus would not only overestimate their own attractiveness, but also perceive unattractive others to be more attractive compared to how these are rated by attractive people. It was therefore investigated if unattractive participants overestimate their own attractiveness the less they differentiate between attractive and unattractive stimulus persons