Correlates of the tendency toward physical attractiveness stereotyping: Individual differences in cognitive structure and political party affiliation.

Abstract

Twenty active supporters of each of Canada's three major political parties attempted to identify, from photographs previously scaled for physical attractiveness, supporters of their own and of the other two parties. Each subject, also completed a modified version of Scott, Osgood, and Peterson's (1979) complete battery of cognitive structure tests. Liberals and Progressive Conservatives identified more attractive photos as being of supporters of their own parties. New Democrats selected less attractive photos as being of supporters of their party. In-group bias in photo-sorting correlated with Affective-Evaluative Consistency, Affective Balance, and Dimensionality for Progressive Conservative supporters. Out-group bias correlated with Affective Balance for New Democratic Party supporters. New Democrats had lower Affective Balance scores than Liberals, and lower Image Comparability scores than Liberals or Progressive Conservatives.Parallel with the development of interest in the cognitive approach to the study of stereotyping (Hamilton, 1979) has been the reporting of a pervasive tendency to attribute physical attractiveness or unattractiveness to a wide variety of social groups (Hannson & Duffield, 1976;Johnson, Doiron, Brooks & Dickinson, 1978;Jones, Hannson, & Phillips, 1978). Nonetheless, there have been no reports of individual differences in this tendency. Even attempts at correlating attractiveness stereotyping with attitudes toward the stereotyped groups have met with mixed results (