﻿Past research has shown that how people rate their physical attractiveness
is only moderately correlated with how they are rated by others (r=0.24), suggesting that
at least some people have little insight into their true level of attractiveness,
but a paper published in 2020 by Professor Tobias Grietmeyer of the University of Innsbruck
in Austria suggests that this is largely due to self-perceived bias or perhaps even self-delusion
by the most unattractive. In fact, the most unattractive, as we can see in this figure,
considered themselves on average to be just below a six on an attractiveness scale of
1 to 9, so well above average, while in reality they were actually rated as just above a 3,
just above the bottom third of the rest of the population. As you can see, this gap in perception
narrows until above average participants finally give an accurate rating of their
own attractiveness, with the most attractive people actually rating themselves as being
lower than reality. Could this be driven by a sense of unfairness, or mistreatment by others,
perhaps? Well, no. The study also found that the participant’s belief in how others perceived
their attractiveness was also lower than their actual attractiveness, suggesting either ignorance
of what is perceived to be attractive at best, and at worst genuine self-delusion.
We’ll go into why this might be later, but first we should go into why this concept might
be familiar to some viewers. Participants in Study 1 were 191 individuals
(130 females, 61 males; mean age = 22.1 years - include at bottom of screen for above para
This is because this study is very reminiscent of the Dunning Kruger effect,
which I’m sure many of you will be familiar with, the idea being that there exists an
innate cognitive bias whereby people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability,
with high performers tending to underestimate their skills. The Dunning–Kruger effect appears
in both cases but is more pronounced in relative terms: the bottom quartile or 25% of performers
tend to see themselves as being part of the top two quartiles. It is usually explained in terms of
meta-cognitive abilities. This approach is based on the idea that poor performers have not yet
acquired the ability to distinguish between good and bad performances and they tend to overrate
themselves because they do not see the difference between their performances and the performances of
others. This might be due to the fact that they are not exposed to genuine ability through their
workplace and friendship groups, so don’t know what they don’t know. However, we surely can’t say
the same for attractiveness. Even before instagram models, adverts, and Qoves (I joke, of course),
people are constantly being exposed to objective beauty standards through fashion
magazines and films. So why do we have this phenomenon for attractiveness?
Well, this is what Professor Grietmeyer sought to find out by employing six studies to
find out how and why this ‘Grietmeyer Effect’ [to coin a new term] exists. In study 3 for example,
they examined whether the motive to perceive oneself in a favourable light accounts for the
tendency that unattractive people overestimate their attractiveness. People typically exhibit a
strong tendency to discredit negative information about themselves (e.g., Ditto & Lopez, 1992;
Shepperd, 1993), and studies have show that affirming the self-concept may satisfy the
motivation to protect one’s self-worth and thus can counteract the biased processing of negative
information about the self (Reed & Aspinwall, 1998; Sherman, Nelson & Steele, 2000). Hence,
Study 3 examined whether unattractive people would be less likely to overestimate their
attractiveness after an affirmation of self-worth, after inevitably saying ‘yes’ to questions like:
“Have you ever been generous and selfless to another person?”. Also, to address the possibility
that people use those attractiveness criteria that best serve their wish to be attractive,
such as having a nice body to compensate for an unattractive face, separate measures of the
participant’s attractiveness of the face, body, and overall appearance were employed. However,
as you can see, nothing changed. Participants were not employing confirmation bias based on
a single aspect of their body, and nor were they seeking self-affirmation.
Study 4 tried to correct for exposure to different attractiveness levels,
so participants were exposed to attractive or unattractive people before rating themselves. It
was hypothesised that unattractive participants would lower their self-rated attractiveness
(and thereby reduce the tendency to overestimate their attractiveness compared to the objective
ratings) after being exposed to attractive people (compared to the condition where they were exposed
to unattractive stimulus persons or the control condition). In contrast, attractive participants
should be less affected because there is little discrepancy in attractiveness between themselves
and the attractive stimulus persons. As you can see, however, this also had little effect.
However, interestingly study 6 did something similar, although this time
they allowed participants to select different comparison targets to see if unattractive
more than attractive people select unattractive others to compare their attractiveness
to. If not, then it could be likely that both unattractive and attractive people may come to
the conclusion that their attractiveness level is similar to others, which could
then explain the overestimation. As we can see, though, unattractive people,
rather predictably at this point, chose unattractive people to compare themselves to.
They also found that unattractive participants rated other unattractive people as higher than
attractive people do, with ratings of attractive people being more uniform (the blue line). So it
appears that participants are not bringing others down for the sake of doing so, or to
make themselves look better, but genuinely have different standards lower down the attractiveness
spectrum as a result of their own appearance. In other words, they slightly modify their what
they think are objective standards to suit their appearance, and not the other way
round. This isn’t pragmatic narcissism. Another interesting note to add is that,
although, as we mentioned, unattractive people were more likely to choose unattractive people
to compare themselves to, there were some who did, which, as we can see in this graph,
seems to have had an effect on their rating of their own attractiveness. So
this study has solved part of the puzzle. But for the remaining gap, what can we say?
Why do we have this discrepancy? Well, study 6 is clearly the most revealing. Although participant’s
choice of who to compare themselves to did not have an impact on how unattractive participants
rated their own attractiveness, the finding that unattractive participants selected
unattractive stimulus persons with whom they would compare their attractiveness to
suggests that they may have an inkling, albeit a subconscious one, that they are less attractive
than they want to be, or consciously claim. Given that people tend to compare themselves
with those who they feel are similar (as shown by Wood, 1989), it appears that the unattractive
participants realised that they had more in common with the unattractive rather than the attractive
stimulus persons. Even though the self-ratings of the unattractive participants suggest otherwise,
they seem to realise that they are less attractive than others. Maybe this is purely an effect of the
fact that this is a study, and thus they are on the face of it revealing an insecurity of theirs
to a group of anonymous researchers, and not to someone that they can confide, like a friend.
But even with this study flaw, this is quite revealing. The prospect that they might be
more honest about their attractiveness to a friend than to an anonymous group of researchers
suggests that they do acknowledge the importance of attractiveness.
Whereas there is generally high agreement about who is attractive and who is not, beauty is still
to a small extent in the eye of the beholder. There is relatively high agreement about the
attractiveness of very attractive, attractive, about average, and unattractive individuals,
but there is still disagreement about who is very unattractive, as shown by (Kanazawa, Hu & Larere,
2018), meaning that very unattractive individuals are attractive to some. There are clearly some
paradoxical advantages to being very unattractive. For example, very unattractive women (not men)
are more likely to be married than others, and there is some truth to the claim that scientists
are more likely to be taken more seriously if they are unattractive, but that is for another video.