The benefits of beauty – Individual differences in the pro-attractiveness bias in social decision making

Abstract

While there already is a huge body of research examining the advantages and disadvantages of physical attractiveness in social and economic decisions, little research has been made to explore the role of individual differences in social decision-making with regard to beauty. To close this scientific gap, we conducted a multiparadigm online study (N = 210; 52% females) in which participants were asked to make decisions in four different economic games facing differently attractive counterparts. Additionally, the personality trait agreeableness was assessed to test for individual differences in decision-making. In exploratory analyses, we also assessed which facet of agreeableness is the most appropriate to predict individual differences in the various economic games. In the study, we were able to replicate the finding of a beauty premium and a plainness penalty but did not find any support for the idea of a beauty penalty. Furthermore, evidence for an opposite-sex advantage was found, which was greater when men were facing women than the other way around. While agreeableness as an overall trait influenced decision making across various paradigms, interactions of distinct facets of agreeableness with the partners’ attractiveness remain heterogeneous and ambiguous. This underlines the importance of integrating the specificity of certain traits in experimental research and the necessity of combining them with different social situations.

Valence framing induces cognitive bias

“…Saad & Gill, 2001) as well as both simultaneously (e.g. Croson & Gneezy, 2009;Voit et al, 2021). Moreover, there is evidence for gender differences in framing effects on allocation tasks (Chowdhury et al, 2017).…”

The role of social context in risky decision‐making: Presence of friend and low resistance to peer influence increase risky decision‐making

“…Additionally, a common trait in people with high agreeableness is the ability to empathise, and further evidence shows that people who are less empathetic tend to make riskier choices than those who are more empathetic (Uijong et al, 2019). Also, other research has found that high agreeableness as a trait is related to being more altruistic, trusting, and cooperative and in that regard high agreeableness would lead to less risky decision‐making (Voit et al, 2021).…”

A Novel Deep Neural Network for Facial Beauty Improvement

“…The core idea of deep residual learning is to introduce residual connections (also known as skip connections). As deep residual networks, such learning system can be abbreviated as ResNet [46][47][48][49][50][51] We chose ResNet-50 as the backbone of our learning system and will compare its performance with ResNet-18 and ResNeXt-50 at the end of Section 3. That is, the first residual block consists of three residual units, each of which consists of three convolutional layers.…”