New Study Confirms Pretty People Are Seen As More Trustworthy

Science has confirmed that beautiful people naturally have the "halo effect."

If you don't know what that term means, it's basically when your overall impression of someone is based on a single characteristic. For example, attractive people are usually assumed to have positive traits simply because they're eye candy. Beautiful individuals get better treatment and more opportunities than your average Joe. They get free things, more suitors, and are seen as more trustworthy.

Adam Zylbersztejn, Zakaria Babutsidze, Nobuyuki Hanaki, and Astrid Hopfensitz wanted to test whether attractive people were also "more likely to benefit from people's trust, which makes it easier for them to get promoted or to strike business deals." Their study began in October 2019, and they conducted three experiments in France with 357 volunteers.

They asked the first 76 volunteers to participate in an experiment involving "economic decision-making." Participants were matched into pairs without knowing who they were playing with. Group A was tasked with a role that required them to trust another person, while Group B had to break the trust they received. Hopfensitz explained, "It went like this: in a first stage, Player A had to choose whether to trust Player B (by saying 'Right') or not (by saying 'Left'). Secondly, Player B had to decide whether to roll a dice or not."

According to Hopfensitz...

• If Player A chooses "left," both players receive 5 euros. 

• If Player A chooses "right" and Player B chooses "don't roll," Player A receives nothing while Player B gets 14 euros.

• Lastly, if player A chooses "right" and player B selects "roll," if the number on the die is 1 to 5, player A gets 12 euros, and player B gets 10.  If the die is 6, player A receives nothing, but player B receives 10 euros.

To summarize, if the As wanted to earn up to 12 euros, they had to trust the other player. They were given an abstract choice scenario to make their decision. If they decided not to trust the other player, they'd still get a measly 5 euros for participation. However, once player A trusted player B, their fate was in B's hands.

The second experiment is simpler and took place in Lyon. The researchers took pictures of participants before they played the game. Participants then had to predict how another player would behave in the game based on their photo. If they were right, they'd be rewarded with more money. The last study took place in Nice, and the same photographs were shown to another group of 103 people from southern France. They were asked to rate how beautiful they considered the people in the photos.

The results are not surprising. "Our results confirm that those people who are considered to be more beautiful by our raters are also believed to be much more trustworthy. This implies that in our abstract economic exchange, beautiful individuals are more likely to benefit from the trust of others," Hopfensitz wrote. Does this mean that they are more trustworthy, though?

Not exactly. Hopfensitz continued, "However, when investigating actual behavior, we see that beautiful individuals are neither more nor less trustworthy than anyone else. In other words, trustworthiness is driven by good old individual values and personality, which are not correlated with how someone looks."

Hopfensitz also noted that women "are generally believed to have a higher degree of social intelligence" than men and "might be better at determining the trustworthiness of their partners," but that their results did not show any evidence of such claims. The female participants were rated as more beautiful but also rated others, on average, as more attractive. And if you thought that women had more integrity than men in this game, you're wrong. "However, women do not act any more honorably in the game than men," said the study's author.

Just because someone is beautiful doesn't mean they're a saint – but they do get more privileges.

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