Stereotype Directionality and Attractiveness Stereotyping: Is Beauty Good or is Ugly Bad?

Dion, Berscheid, and Walster (1972), in their seminal article, labeled the attribution of positive characteristics to attractive people the "beauty-is-good" stereotype. The stereotyping literature since then provides extensive evidence for the differential judgment and treatment of attractive versus unattractive people, but does not indicate whether it is an advantage to be attractive or a disadvantage to be unattractive. Two studies investigated the direction of attractiveness stereotyping by comparing judgments of positive and negative attributes for medium vs.

The role of facial attractiveness and facial masculinity/femininity in sex classification of faces.

We tested whether adults (experiment 1) and 4 - 5-year-old children (experiment 2) identify the sex of highly attractive faces faster and more accurately than not very attractive faces in a reaction-time task. We also assessed whether facial masculinity/femininity facilitated identification of sex. Results showed that attractiveness facilitated adults' sex classification of both female and male faces and children's sex classification of female, but not male, faces.

Origins of a stereotype: categorization of facial attractiveness by 6-month-old infants.

Like adults, young infants prefer attractive to unattractive faces (e.g. Langlois, Roggman, Casey, Ritter, Rieser-Danner & Jenkins, 1987; Slater, von der Schulenburg, Brown, Badenoch, Butterworth, Parsons & Samuels, 1998).