People tend to assign higher attractiveness to an individual viewed from the back than head on; this tendency is pronounced when males rate the attractiveness of women

Romantic Bias in Judging the Attractiveness of Faces from the Back. Fuka Ichimura, Miho Moriwaki & Atsunori Ariga. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, Apr 8 2021. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10919-021-00361-7

Abstract: People tend to assign higher attractiveness to an individual viewed from the back than head on. This tendency is pronounced when males rate the attractiveness of women. This study investigated reasons for the previously observed gender difference in this bias, focusing on the social relationship between raters (participants) and rated models (stimuli). To manipulate the assumed social relationship, we explicitly instructed participants in advance to rate the front/back view of an opposite-gender individual as a romantic partner (romance-based condition) or as a friend (friend-based condition). The back-view bias was robustly observed in both male and female raters under every condition. More importantly, male raters showed an enhanced back-view bias under the romance-based condition compared to the friend-based condition, whereas female raters showed less bias, irrespective of the assumed social relationship. We discuss these results in terms of gender differences in criteria used to form judgments of attractiveness.

Attractive people are not only seen more favorably, but also more accurately, maybe due to their acceptance being relatively decoupled from their behaviors, which lowers inhibitions and allow for better "study" of their personalities

The Good Target of Personality Judgments. Marie-Catherine Mignault and Lauren J. Human. In The Oxford Handbook of Accurate Personality Judgment, edited by Tera D. Letzring and Jana S. Spain. Mar 2021, DOI 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190912529.013.7

Abstract: Being a good target, judgeable, or high in expressive accuracy plays a fundamental role in the accuracy of personality judgments. In line with Funder’s realistic accuracy model (RAM), targets are responsible for the quality and quantity of information—or cues—they provide to judges, and have the potential to influence how much attention and cognitive resources judges dedicate to those cues. In this chapter, target characteristics are discussed, such as psychological adjustment and social skills, which influence each stage of the RAM, thereby distinguishing good targets from targets that are more elusive or difficult to read. To conclude, possible intra- and inter-personal benefits of expressive accuracy and potential ways to enhance expressive accuracy are considered.

Keywords: good target, judgeability, expressive accuracy, personality judgment, psychological adjustment, social skill, realistic accuracy model

Estimating the Effect Size of Moral Contagion in Online Networks: Each message is 12% more likely to be shared for each additional moral-emotional word

Brady, William J., and Jay J. Van Bavel. 2021. “Estimating the Effect Size of Moral Contagion in Online Networks: A Pre-registered Replication and Meta-analysis.” OSF Preprints. April 7. doi:10.31219/osf.io/s4w2x

Abstract: Over 4 billion people now use social media platforms. As our social lives become more entangled than ever before with online social networks, it is important to understand the dynamics of online information diffusion. This is particularly true for the political domain, as political elites, disinformation profiteers and social activists all utilize social media to gain influence by spreading information. Recent work found that emotional expressions related to the domain of morality (moral emotion expression) are associated with increased diffusion of political messages--a phenomenon we called ‘moral contagion’. Here, we perform a large, pre-registered direct replication (N = 849,266) of Brady et al. (2017), as well as a meta-analysis of all available data testing moral contagion (5 independent labs, 27 studies, N = 4,821,006). The estimate of moral contagion in the available population of studies is positive and significant (IRR = 1.12, 95% CI = [1.06, 1.19]), such that each message is 12% more likely to be shared for each additional moral-emotional word. The mean effect size of the large, pre-registered replication (IRR = 1.15) better estimated the effect size of the available population of studies than the original study (IRR = 1.20). These findings reinforce the importance of replication and producing a pre-registered analysis to generate accurate estimates of effect size for future studies.