The Importance Of Physical Beauty

returned if lost (Benson et. al., 1976), is found to be having an impact on the employment related decisions, such as promotion recommendations (Abel, Millicent H., Croysdale, A, & Stiles, 2009), hiring (Hatfield & Rapson, 2000) and income of the employees (Hamermesh, 2011). This biasness can go as far as to influence the perceptions of the teachers in terms of how intelligent and academically competent a child is (Clifford & Walster, 1973). Meta analysis of fourteen different studies conducted by Dusek and Joseph (1983) clearly showed that the teacher’s expectations regarding the child’s academic and social potential is significantly correlated with the child’s physical beauty.

The present study aims to demonstrate the relation between physical

One way of defining “physical beauty” objectively might be in terms of the agreement between the inter raters i.e an individual can be defined as attractive if there is a significant rating consensus between a number of judges (Cotter, 2011). Evidence also suggests that there is no significant difference in attractiveness judgment of both the males and the females (Franzoi & Herzog, 1987).

It has been researched that facial perception is an important phenomena in social interactions, which guides the way we evaluate the personalities of others (Todorov et.al, 2008). Maddox (2004) found that this facial perception also differs from culture to culture e.g facial cues associated with beauty in Asian Americans are skin color, hair color, hairstyle and hair texture. A broader chin has been found to be associated with high attractiveness (Cunnigham, Barbee & Pike, 1990). Evaluating the facial appearance of others can lead to the formation of first impressions (Rule & Ambady, 2010) which can lead to the prediction of an individual’s performance in various domains (Rule & Ambady, 2008) but this facial information often leads to biased perceptions , thus leading to stereotyping and favoritisim (Zebrowitz, Bronstad & Lee , 2007). This evaluation of the faces does not take long; rather it is quick phenomena. As shown by Willis and Todorov (2006) that as little as 0.1 second

Buss (1998) desribes that attractiveness in females is given importance as it is supposed to be linked with reproductive fitness and youth whereas the women seek men with resources rather than physical attractiveness, the men tend to seek and please the women whom they find to be physically attractive thus justifying the reason for differential perception and treatment directed towards the attractive females. The stereotype related to beauty i.e “what is beautiful is good” might be true if explained in terms of the “self fulfilling prophecy” i.e attractive individuals are in real better than less attractive ones and thus are more subjected to biasness and favouritism. Self fulfilling prophecy works in a way that it turns the expectations or social stereotypes into reality (Zebrowitz, 1997). It works in a multistep mechanism , involving a) Facial appearance of others elicits certain social stereotypes or expectations b) these expectations are acted on by the perceiver in the form of differential perceptions and treatment of the attractive and unattractive targets, (c) The differential judgment and treatment cause the development of behavior and traits in attractive and unattractive targets, and (d) attractive and unattractive targets internalize these differential