Unattractive people are unaware of their (un)attractiveness

Unattractive people are unaware of their (un)attractiveness. Tobias Greitemeyer. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, March 11 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjop.12631

Abstract: Past research has shown that how people rate their physical attractiveness is only moderately correlated with how they are rated by others, suggesting that at least some people have little insight into their true level of attractiveness. The present research tests the hypothesis that unattractive people are not aware of their unattractiveness. In fact, six studies (overall N = 1,180) showed that unattractive participants considerably overestimated their attractiveness compared to ratings by strangers. In contrast, attractive participants were more accurate. If anything, they underestimated their attractiveness. It was also examined why unattractive people overestimate their attractiveness. As expected, unattractive participants differentiated less between attractive and unattractive stimulus persons than did attractive participants. They were also more likely than attractive participants to select unattractive stimulus persons to compare themselves to. However, these tendencies did not account for why unattractive participants overestimated their attractiveness, nor did affirming participant’s self‐worth. Limitations and avenues for future research are discussed.

Discussion

Study 6 replicated Study 5 that unattractive people differentiate less than attractive people between unattractive and attractive stimulus persons. In particular, unattractive participants were more favorable toward unattractive stimulus persons. Study 6 further showed that unattractive participants were more likely than attractive participants to select an unattractive stimulus person with whom they would compare their attractiveness to. However, neither of these tendencies could explain why unattractive participants overestimated their attractiveness compared to the ratings by the other participants.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The present set of studies addressed the relationship between self‐ratings of attractiveness and ratings by others. As in previous research (for meta‐analyses, Feingold, 1992; Langlois et al., 2000), the experimenters (Studies 1, 3–5), raters of the participant’s photographs (Study 2), and other participants (Study 6) showed high agreement about whether a person is attractive or not. In contrast, the relationship between the participant’s subjective and objective attractiveness ratings was relatively small. That is, whereas the interrater agreement of ratings of a target’s attractiveness was high, some of the targets had a different perception of how attractive they are.
All six studies provide compelling evidence that self‐ratings of unattractive people mostly differ from how others perceive their attractiveness. In fact, relative to ratings by strangers, all studies showed that unattractive participants considerably overestimated their attractiveness. It is remarkable that across all studies, unattractive participants reported to be above‐average (relative to the scale midpoint) and their self‐rated attractiveness was similar to how the objectively attractive participants rated their attractiveness. Moreover, unattractive participants were mostly unaware of how others rate their attractiveness. The objective attractiveness was much lower than how the unattractive participants believed to be perceived by strangers. Overall, unattractive participants judged themselves to be of about average attractiveness and they showed very little awareness that strangers do not share this view. In contrast, attractive participants had more insights into how attractive they actually are. If anything, they underestimated their attractiveness. It thus appears that unattractive people maintain illusory self‐perceptions of their attractiveness, whereas attractive people’s self‐views are more grounded in reality.
Whereas the effect that unattractive people overestimate their attractiveness compared to ratings by strangers could be firmly established, elucidating the exact underlying mechanisms awaits future research. The present studies tested some possible mechanisms but these appeared not to be the driving forces. Based on self‐affirmation theory (Steele, 1988), it was reasoned that if the overestimation effect has motivational roots, then affirming other aspects of the self should reduce defensive processes so that more accurate self‐perceptions result. However, both Studies 3 and 4 showed that a self‐affirmation manipulation that had successfully reduced defensive processing in previous research (Reed & Aspinwall, 1998) did not affect how unattractive participants rated their attractiveness. Hence, it appears that the wish to perceive oneself in a favorable way is not the main mechanism why unattractive people overestimate their attractiveness.
However, meta‐cognitive capacity and the comparison target approach also did not explain why the unattractive participants overestimated their attractiveness. Kruger and Dunning (1999) argued that incompetent people lack metacognitive skills that are needed to discern that one’s performance is poor. In line with their theorizing, they found that relatively incompetent participants were less able to gauge the competence of their peers than were relatively competent participants. We found a similar effect, in that unattractive participants differentiated less between attractive and unattractive stimulus persons than did attractive participants. In particular, they gave unattractive stimulus persons higher ratings than did attractive participants, whereas attractive stimulus persons were rated similarly. It thus appears that unattractive people not only perceive themselves as relatively attractive, they also rate other unattractive individuals relatively favorably. However, that unattractive people have particular beauty ideals (or have less meta‐cognitive skills to differentiate between attractive and unattractive stimulus persons) did not have an impact on how they perceive themselves. That is, that unattractive participants overestimated their attractiveness compared to ratings by strangers is not due to them rating all unattractive people (including themselves) relatively favorably.
Likewise, we did find the predicted effects that unattractive participants selected unattractive stimulus persons and attractive participants selected attractive stimulus persons with whom they would compare their attractiveness to. Hence, it would have been possible that both attractive and unattractive people believe that their attractiveness level is similar to most others, which could have explained the findings that attractive participants underestimated their attractiveness and that unattractive participants overestimated it. However, whether participants selected an attractive or unattractive stimulus person had no impact on how they rated their own attractiveness and thus could not explain why the self‐rated attractiveness of attractive and unattractive people hardly differed.
Although comparison choice did not have an impact on how unattractive participants rated their own attractiveness, the finding that unattractive participants selected unattractive stimulus persons with whom they would compare their attractiveness to suggests that they may have an inkling that they are less attractive than they want it to be. Given that people tend to compare themselves with those who they feel are similar (Wood, 1989), it appears that the unattractive participants realized that they had more in common with the unattractive rather than the attractive stimulus persons. Even though the self‐ratings of the unattractive participants suggest otherwise and that the unattractive participants reported to perceive themselves to be less attractive than they actually are, they seem to realize that they are less attractive than others.

Limitations and future research

Whereas the finding that unattractive people overestimate their attractiveness is extremely robust and can be considered a fact (in all studies, the effect sizes were large and relatively consistent in their magnitude), the underlying mechanisms are unclear so far. Theoretical explanations are available and were tested in the present research, but although some promising effects were found (e.g., attractive and unattractive participants differed in their ratings of unattractive stimulus persons), the mechanism why unattractive people overestimate their attractiveness is still unknown and needs further work.
In this regard, it might be important that the present research compared self‐ratings of attractiveness with attractiveness ratings by strangers. Previous research has shown that self‐ratings are typically higher than ratings by strangers (a finding that was consistently replicated in the present research), but self‐ratings tend to be lower than ratings by spouses (e.g., Murstein & Christy, 1976). More generally, it has repeatedly been shown that not only objectively visible traits but also contextual variables can influence how people’s physical attractiveness is rated by others (e.g., Faust, Chatterjee & Christopoulos, 2018; Kniffin & Wilson, 2004). For example, factors unrelated to physical features such as membership in a common social group (Escasa, Gray & Patton, 2010) or feelings toward other people (Kniffin, Wansink, Griskevicius & Wilson, 2014) have been shown to have an impact on the perception of others' attractiveness. In sum, there is the strong tendency that people rate a familiar individual that they also like as more attractive than would someone who is unfamiliar with that individual. As a consequence, it may well be that there is more concordance between how unattractive people perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others with whom they have social ties.
Moreover, whereas there is generally high agreement about who is attractive and who is not, beauty is still to some extent in the eye of the beholder. For example, in one study (Cross & Cross, 1971), 300 judges rated the attractiveness of stimulus persons in groups of six. The most attractive person was picked as best of its group by 207 judges, but even the least attractive person was chosen as best of its group by four judges. Interestingly, whereas there is relatively high agreement about the attractiveness of very attractive, attractive, about average, and unattractive individuals, there is rather disagreement about who is very unattractive (Kanazawa, Hu & Larere, 2018), meaning that very unattractive individuals are attractive to some (as in the Cross & Cross, 1971, study).
It thus may be that unattractive people take the positive feedback from their loved ones and those (few) that are attracted to them and use these as anchors for their self‐ratings and for how they believe they are rated by strangers. In fact, people selectively forget (Sedikides, Green, Saunders, Skowronksi & Zengel, 2016) and denigrate (Ditto & Lopez, 1992; Shepperd, 1993) negative feedback about themselves and they preferentially want to receive self‐enhancing feedback (Gaertner, Sedikides & Cai, 2012). Future research would be thus welcome that assesses the objective attractiveness of a target by raters that know the attractiveness target and examines to what extent people integrate these ratings into their self‐perceived attractiveness.
There is a further reason why a comparison between self‐ratings and ratings by people who are familiar with the target person would be worthwhile. As the present studies suggest, the unattractive participants deceived themselves in that they perceived themselves as more attractive than is actually warranted. Evolutionary theorizing (e.g., von Hippel & Trivers, 2011) argues that such an instance of overconfidence may have social advantages. For example, people may hold inflated self‐views as a means of persuading others to adopt these overly positive perceptions of them. That is, self‐deception evolved because it facilitates the deception of others. In line with these ideas, recent research (Murphy, von Hippel, Dubbs et al., 2015) tested whether overconfidence is associated with desirableness as a dating partner. In fact, overconfident authors’ of dating profiles were perceived as more desirable and this effect was mediated by how confident raters perceived the authors to be. Therefore, it might be that people who learn that an objectively unattractive individual perceives him/herself in a positive way may assume that this person has some physical qualities that warrant the confidence and, in turn, perceive the person more favorably. Future research may examine whether self‐ratings of attractiveness indeed have an impact on how an individual is perceived by others after the raters learned about the self‐ratings.
Another avenue for future research would be to examine why attractive participants underestimated how attractive they were rated by strangers. Part of the reason could be due to regression‐to‐the‐mean (if participants are rated very highly by others, there is little room left for overestimation). However, the unattractive participants’ overestimation was much more pronounced than was the attractive participants’ underestimation so the finding that attractive people underestimate their attractiveness is likely to have psychological roots as well.
Finally, a limitation of the present studies is that the raters in all studies could only see the faces and clothed bodies of the participants. It is rather likely that the participants considered not only their faces and dressed appearance but also their naked bodies to estimate their level of attractiveness. Hence, part of the reason why the self‐ratings of unattractive participants differed from the experimenter ratings could be that different criteria were used as indicators of the overall attractiveness (cf., Dunning et al., 1989).