Physical Attractiveness Biases Judgments Pertaining to the Moral Domain of Purity
Open Access
- 29 December 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
- Vol. 49 (2), 282-295
- https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211064452
Abstract
Research on the Beauty-is-Good stereotype shows that unattractive people are perceived to have worse moral character than attractive individuals. Yet research has not explored what kinds of moral character judgments are particularly biased by attractiveness. In this work, we tested whether attractiveness particularly biases moral character judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity, beyond a more general halo effect. Across four preregistered studies (N = 1,778), we found that unattractive (vs. attractive) individuals were judged to be more likely to engage in purity violations compared with harm violations and that this was not due to differences in perceived moral wrongness, weirdness, or sociality between purity and harm violations. The findings shed light on how physical attractiveness influences moral character attributions, suggesting that physical attractiveness particularly biases character judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity.This publication has 53 references indexed in Scilit:
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