The ultimate greatest irony in the whole debate is that the looks vs personality is a false dichotomy.
Good looking people usually do have the best personalities because how can you demand someone who
is ugly and has been rejected every time and thus become isolated for years to have a personality
at all that alone to have a good enough one that will make up for their looks. Life is just a
result of our lived experiences and the more positive feedback we receive, which is mostly
affected by looks the more we reinforce positive behaviour. It is often thought that attractive
people must have repulsive personalities because they've never had to work on improving themselves
in any other way. The virtue of being born aesthetically gifted is not enough to go through life with
the personality of a doorknob but this is actually a comforting lie because the very statement that
attractive people do not have personalities is not falsifiable meaning it cannot be proven wrong
and so we take comfort in believing that attractive people go through life without trying to
better themselves in the same way that everyone else does. They watch Koo's charisma on command
Daniel Simmons and channels just like that just like you do because they want to become even better.
In reality, attractive people do develop the most likable personalities because everything else in
life is biased in their favour. A number of psychology effects from the halo effect to
deserving exterior and sociometer theory grant unfair benefits that allow them to experience
more freely throughout life which are direct requirements to building a personality which is why
it is arguably better to invest in your physical looks first rather than your personality
because of the psychological phenomena that were covered in this video. But to understand the
problem we need to define personality. Personality theory and research by Sauravon in
Pervin 2022 defines attractive personality as charisma. If I say that Kevin Hart has a lot of
personality that's not the same usage of the word as saying oh my professor has zero personality.
Personality in this sense refers to charisma being able to say the right things at the right time
make people feel the right emotions is what charisma is and that refers back to attraction.
What the average person considers a likable personality is actually based on a few theories.
The nominological, trait theory, behaviorism and personal construct theory all of which revolve
around one's human interpretation of the world. In simple speak how you are treated by the world
shapes how you see it. And so how you react to it forms your personality. Negative experiences
lead to negative broken people. Positive experiences lead to healthy positive people. You see
physical looks are a form of social capital. A likable personality is also a form of social
capital. Social capital are a form of let's say an invisible wealth that you or I have to convince
people around us to do things instead of paying someone with real money to do something for me.
They do it because they like me. Whether it be to marry and live happily ever after or
calm someone out of their life savings. Marina Toulin and her colleagues in the 2018 paper use
this concept of social capital to explain that personality shapes the individual's ability to
create social capital. A likable person will be invited to more events, get more opportunities,
rise up to social ladder faster than an un likable person. An attractive person makes the friend group
look good. Again, getting more opportunities, building more experiences. These are all benefits of
your social capital. In fact, in their thesis, they link openness, extraversion, emotional stability
and agreeableness as being the key factors for generating social capital. And as a reminder,
we want more social capital to live better lives. But if you're unattractive and badly socialized
and this is what that comment at the beginning was talking about, put it into more scientific terms
you lack the social capital to convince others to help you live a quality life. If Toulin's paper
suggests that being outgoing, friendly, socially adjusted, emotionally stable are necessary
for building social capital. Even without any studies, at this point, I think you and I
can probably already guess that being unattractive will put you at a huge disadvantage to have the
skills needed to make social capital. One reason for this is that physical looks and personality
are not separate entities, but are actually very closely intertwined. McGloin and Denese
2016 found that men perceive attractive women as less trustworthy and women perceive attractive
men as more trustworthy. The concept of what is an attractive personality trait in this sense is
actually very arbitrary, it's not fixed. It changes based on external factors. Similarly,
physical looks can also be arbitrary to a limit. That's why we say that beauty is both subjective
and objective. As a handsome guy can quickly become a very repulsive one if he has a ugly
personality, he says some very silly things. This implies that you cannot have one without the other,
looks and personality, or going back to McGloin's study, less attractive men are perceived as less
trustworthy by women and less attractive women are perceived as more trustworthy by men. The scale of
personality goes up and down with looks and by sex demographics. Another argument for this is
the well-known halo effect. First observed by psychologists Edward Dorndyke in 1920,
this is a bias that we have for attractive people, where we assume that by being attractive,
they must be good in all other aspects of their life as well, such as being more likeable having
a better personality. We see this bias form in children as young as three years old, and again
going back to the idea that personality and looks are interlinked with each other, the opposite of
the halo effect is called the devil effect. Basically, we're unattractive people are assumed
automatically to have unlikable personalities and to be anti-social people. If you want to learn
more about this, there's something called the double devil effect. Listen to episode 7 of the
Deep Dive podcast on Spotify. Norman and colleagues 2009 also confirmed that physical appearances are
directly tied to how people perceive or they see your personality. The researchers found
quite accurate links between emotional stability and physical looks, and if you remember going back,
emotional stability is one of those factors with generating social capital, the way you present
yourself from being tensed or relaxed, always smiling or grim and serious, having a sickly,
blemished appearance, acne scars, versus having glass smooth skin, tell the world a lot of non-verbal
cues about your personality and more often than not, it's actually very accurate. Lastly,
Holtzmann and Strube 2013 find that people with negative personality traits tend to either be
more physically attractive or create an attractive persona to lure their victims. From dressing
better being squeaky clean, being deceptively likable, ironically the most successful serial killers
in the past had to look deliberately and behave nothing like a serial killer. The idea that beauty
equals a lack of personality is a foolish idea because personality can be fact more easily than
physical looks can. An example of this behavior was American serial killer Ted Bundy who no doubt
was a handsome man and used his looks to develop a charming personality, not the other way around.
And we know this from empirical evidence and this charm is what he would use to attract female
victims. Had Ted Bundy looked a certain way, then he probably wouldn't have gotten the ability
to build his charm and charisma. Ugly intentions were hidden behind a handsome appearance,
just like the recent paper proposed. And the scary thing is, all of these examples his victims
would have considered him to have a likable personality and the victims are a proxy for the rest
of society because he did have a likable personality. The monster within was never shown only until
the very end. What was shown was his physical looks. So perhaps if you haven't called on to the
title of this video, attractive people have the best personalities. It's because even when they're
wrong, they're right. As a whole, as a society we perceive the actions of the attractive to be
much minor transgressions than those of the more unattractive groups. To say that attractive people
have bad personalities is only a half truth because even if they do have a bad personality,
society will perceive it as good. And in this video, there were multiple examples of that. For
example, Holzmann et al. 2010 and Fowler et al. 2009 have both shown that reckless, arrogant,
and psychopathic behavior is attractive during first impressions. Also, if they are attractive,
but the opposite if they are unattractive. I think cognitive illusion 2022, one of my favorite
books, summarizes this best on page 264. In general, good looking people are less likely to be held
responsible for their transgressions than unattractive people. In fact, mistakes committed by attractive
children are taken as mistakes, but unattractive children are thought to be making the mistakes
purposefully or that they'll do it again and they're punished more heavily. If personalities are
formed from the experiences and children as young as three are both aware of beauty and ugly
and are treated differently for it by adults, then there is no justifiable reason for why attractive
people wouldn't on the whole develop better personalities having been given every advantage
available for every funny guy. There's a handsome but also funny version for every bubbly
socialite. There's a prettier version who had the gift of personality handed to them by virtue
of being attractive, not necessarily the other way around.