Beauty is in the Mind of the Beholder:
There’s no getting around it. In this world, you’re happier being good-looking. At all ages and altogether walks of life, attractive people are judged more favorably, treated better, and cut more slack. Mothers give more affection to attractive babies. Teachers favor more attractive students and judge them as smarter. Attractive adults get paid more for his or her work and have better success in dating and mating. And juries are less likely to seek out attractive people guilty and recommend lighter punishments once they do.Many factors can play into personal attractiveness — the way you dress, the way you act, the way you carry yourself, even things that are hard or impossible to vary, like social status and wealth, race, and body size and shape.
But the primary thing we notice once we meet someone is their face. Some faces launch thousand ships and faces that only a mother could love and that we are supremely attuned to inform the difference. The brain, among its many other functions, maybe a beauty detector.
The brain is such an honest beauty detector, in fact, that it can judge the appeal of a face before you’re aware you’ve ever seen one. When participants during a recent study were presented with attractive and unattractive faces for less than 13 milliseconds, they were ready to judge the faces’ attractiveness accurately (that is, by experimenters’ ratings), even though they were not consciously aware of the stimuli and felt like they were just guessing (Olson & Marshuetz, 2005).
There is little question that beauty (which here means both male and feminine attractiveness) is to some extent within the eye of the beholder, but across individuals and across cultures there is nevertheless considerable agreement about what makes a reasonably or handsome face, and therefore the evidence strongly counters the traditional wisdom that attractiveness preferences are mainly acquired through life experience. For one thing, the sweetness bias is already present in infancy. Six-month-olds prefer to look at the same relatively attractive faces that adults do (Rubenstein, Kalakanis, & Langlois, 1999).Truth in Beauty
There’s no getting around it. In this world, you’re happier being good-looking. At all ages and altogether walks of life, attractive people are judged more favorably, treated better, and cut more slack. Mothers give more affection to attractive babies. Teachers favor more attractive students and judge them as smarter. Attractive adults get paid more for his or her work and have better success in dating and mating. And juries are less likely to seek out attractive people guilty and recommend lighter punishments once they do.
Many factors can play into personal attractiveness — the way you dress, the way you act, the way you carry yourself, even things that are hard or impossible to vary, like social status and wealth, race, and body size and shape.
But the primary thing we notice once we meet someone is their face. Some faces launch thousand ships and faces that only a mother could love and that we are supremely attuned to inform the difference. The brain, among its many other functions, maybe a beauty detector.
The brain is such an honest beauty detector, in fact, that it can judge the appeal of a face before you’re aware you’ve ever seen one. When participants during a recent study were presented with attractive and unattractive faces for less than 13 milliseconds, they were ready to judge the faces’ attractiveness accurately (that is, by experimenters’ ratings), even though they were not consciously aware of the stimuli and felt like they were just guessing (Olson & Marshuetz, 2005).
There is little question that beauty (which here means both male and feminine attractiveness) is to some extent within the eye of the beholder, but across individuals and across cultures there is nevertheless considerable agreement about what makes a reasonably or handsome face, and therefore the evidence strongly counters the traditional wisdom that attractiveness preferences are mainly acquired through life experience. For one thing, the sweetness bias is already present in infancy. Six-month-olds prefer to look at the same relatively attractive faces that adults do (Rubenstein, Kalakanis, & Langlois, 1999).
Truth in Beauty
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