Is Beauty Good? A Comparison of the Semantic Differentials of the Terms Beauty and Goodness and Their Gender Specificities

Abstract

Beauty and Goodness are concepts that are often associated, not only in the field of aesthetic inquiry, but also in social psychology. The study examines the similarities and differences between the concepts of Beauty and Goodness among ordinary language users through the application of the semantic differential method using twenty-one pairs of bipolar adjectives. A total of 2,007 participants from 18 to 89 years of age (M = 41.36 years, SD = 16.53) took part in the research, a slight majority were women (53.3%). The basic descriptive data and graphical representation of the semantic differential profiles of the concepts of Beauty and Goodness show that both concepts have similar tendencies towards the individual poles of the bipolar adjective pairs. The concepts of Goodness and Beauty are most similar in the evaluation of the adjective pairs: Inviting/Repulsive, Fast/Slow, and Inspiring/Boring. Further analysis using Paired Samples T tests revealed differences in some adjectives -Goodness is statistically significantly perceived as more soothing and judicious than Beauty (p <0.001), while Beauty is perceived to be more logical than Goodness (p <0.001). The results of the analysis of intergender differences showed that for eleven out of the twenty-one bipolar adjective pairs, there were significant differences in the evaluation of the concepts of Beauty and Goodness between the genders. Women consider the differences between these two concepts to be greater than men, especially in the adjective pairs used in the semantic differential that belong to the potency dimension.