Want to boost your attractiveness? Be kind, says Wharton study

Article content

In a world with multiple wars, combative politics and trash talk on social media, kindness may not seem like it would be much of a social advantage, but a new study from the Wharton School begs to differ (in a nice way).

Researchers at Wharton have found that just by being kind, you can make yourself instantly more attractive to others, reports Inc.com.

Natalia Konova, a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at Wharton, is author of the study, recently published in the British Journal of Psychology.

Article content

Several studies have asserted the effect of physical attractiveness on the opinions people develops of a person. Often positive qualities, such as intelligence and kindness, are ascribed to someone who is physically attractive — whether or not it’s true. Konova wanted to see if this so-called “halo effect” works the other way around. In short: does being beautiful on the inside mean others see you as more physically beautiful?

Her team designed a series of experiments to test how people’s behaviour influenced the estimation of others of their attractiveness. For example, would simply being told about someone’s kind acts cause people to rate them as more beautiful?

After running 10 different experiments on more than 4,000 people, the answer was clear and consistent, reports Inc.com. The more kind a person shows themselves to be, the more beautiful they appear.

Further, if a person is consistently kind, that nature is seen as a fundamental part of their character and has a greater impact on how other people rate their looks.

“Beautiful acts do, indeed, lead us to see people as more beautiful,” says Konova.

Article content

Article content

Moreover, the finding was true regardless of gender, and the impact wasn’t small.

“We thought pro-sociality would play a significant role, but we didn’t expect it to surpass traits like intelligence and humour,” Konova says. “It’s interesting because, while people often view humour and intelligence as highly appealing traits, kindness may actually have a stronger impact on how attractive someone appears.”

Whether you’re looking to impress a potential romantic partner, an investor or a sales prospect, you should think about showing off your kindness along with your stylin’ new look, says Inc.com.

And, as a bonus, other research studies conclude that being kind makes you happier and more resilient.

The Wharton study findings echo the results of a similar one done 10 years ago. It was published on ScienceDirect.com in 2014. It concluded that character and goodness also factor into our perceptions of physical attractiveness.

Researcher, Yan Zhang, and colleagues randomly assigned Chinese participants to one of three groups and had them rate 60 photographs of unfamiliar Chinese female faces, writes psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman for Greater Good Magazine. All the photographs were taken from Google, and all had neutral emotional expressions.

Article content

After a two-week interim, the participants were asked to rate the same pictures again. This time, one group of participants were given positive personality descriptors of the people in the photographs (e.g., decent, honest). But another group of participants were given negative personality descriptors (e.g., evil, mean). A third group were given no information about the people in the photographs.

During the first rating session, no significant differences arose in attractiveness ratings among the three groups. But after the second session, the group given positive descriptors gave top marks for attractiveness, while the group given negative descriptors gave the lowest ratings.

“These findings indicates that human interior psychological activity is related to exterior physical feature(s), and that a human is the whole entity of psychology and physiology,” Kaufman quotes the researchers as saying.

Other researchers, Kevin Kniffin and David Sloan Wilson, conducted similar studies but compared ratings based on whether the people being rated were known to the people doing the rating or not.

Article content

Their findings were similar to Zhang’s. In short, the perceived “fit” of a potential social partner can be influenced by both physical and non-physical traits.

In one study, participants rated photographs of high school classmates for familiarity, likeability, respectability and physical attractiveness. The researchers then instructed a set of strangers (of the same sex and roughly same age) who had never met the people in the photographs to rate them physical attractiveness.

In general, the more the people in the yearbook were familiar, liked, and respected, the more physically attractive they were perceived to be. The effect of non-physical traits on perceptions of physical attractiveness was significant for both sexes.

“These results suggest that sometimes gut reactions to appearance can be overridden, and sometimes even without effort,” writes Kaufman. “All it may take is increased familiarity about the person.”

As the researchers noted, “Among people who actually know and interact with each other, the perception of physical attractiveness is based largely on traits that cannot be detected from physical appearance alone, either from photographs or from actually observing the person before forming a relationship.”

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

Article content