There’s
no
getting
around
it. In
this
world,
you’re
better
off
being
good-
looking. At all ages and in all walks of life, attractive people
are judged more favorably, treated better, and cut more
slack. Mothers give more affection to attractive babies.
Teachers favor more attractive students and judge them as
smarter. Attractive adults get paid more for their work and
have better success in dating and mating. And juries are
less likely to find attractive people guilty and recommend
lighter punishments when they do.
Many factors can play into personal attractiveness — the
way you dress, the way you act, the way you carry yourself,
even things that are hard or impossible to change, like
social status and wealth, race, and body size and shape.
But the first thing we notice when we meet someone is
their face. There are faces that launch a thousand ships,
and faces that only a mother could love, and we are
supremely attuned to tell the difference. The brain, among
its many other functions, is a beauty detector.
The brain is such a good beauty detector, in fact, that it
can judge the appeal of a face before you’re aware you’ve
even seen one. When participants in a recent study were
presented with attractive and unattractive faces for only 13
milliseconds, they were able to judge the faces’
attractiveness accurately (that is, in accordance with
experimenters’ ratings), even though they were not
consciously aware of the stimuli and felt like they were just
guessing (Olson & Marshuetz, 2005).
There is no doubt that beauty (which here means both
male and female attractiveness) is to some extent in the eye
of the beholder, but across individuals and across cultures
there is nevertheless considerable agreement about what
makes a pretty or handsome face, and the evidence
strongly counters the conventional wisdom that
attractiveness preferences are mainly acquired through life
experience. For one thing, the beauty bias is already
present in infancy. Six-month-olds prefer to look at the
same relatively attractive faces that adults do (Rubenstein,
Kalakanis, & Langlois, 1999).
