How To Be Better Looking

Remember that guy you dated in college, whose striking good looks grew less noticeable as you began to see how annoying he was?  Or girl -- you know the one I mean.  New research shows it wasn't just you.  We judge each other's looks not just by hair and cheekbones, but by personality traits.  This is good news if you're facing a jury and your client isn't -- or you're not -- beautiful.

Pretty is as pretty does

The paper is "Personality goes a long way: The malleability of opposite-sex physical attractiveness," by Gary Lewandowski and others, in a journal called Personal Relationships.  There isn't a free copy on line, but you can get the gist from the abstract and the press release. 

The experiment was simple:  take 78 college students, show them pictures of people of the opposite sex, and ask them to rate how attractive the people in the pictures are.  Then wait while they "participate in a distraction task." (I just love social-science writing.)  Later, ask them to rate the pictures again -- but this time, tell them something about the personalities of the people they're looking at.

Just like that guy in school, the people in the pictures got plainer or prettier, in the eyes of the research subjects, depending on what their personalities were supposed to be like.  Honesty and helpfulness looked good; unfairness and rudeness looked bad.  As the abstract puts it, "personality information produced significant changes in ratings of physical attractiveness for attractive, neutral, and unattractive targets." 

More than skin deep

Does this have anything to do with juries?  Absolutely.  Like it or not, physical beauty matters to jurors, as a British study in March most recently showed.  Back then I got to spend one long post on the study itself and another one on what to make of it.  One thing I said was "Remember 'more than skin deep.'  . . . If you have a witness you think may be stereotyped because of the way he looks, there are ways to let the jury see the beauty of his character."  I didn't have a study to cite when I said it, but there is one now.

(Photo by Franco Folini at http://www.flickr.com/photos/livenature/269044687/; license details there.)

Comments

[Vickie Pynchon]

For another take on the topic of beauty (this time on the irritation young women lawyers feel when their lovely youthfulness is a matter of comment) see http://www.negotiationlawblog.com/2006/11/articles/social-psychology/the-power-of-beauty/

[Jediah]

As I read it, the study misses a very real-world dynamic. When a juror is capable of assessing the personality of a witness firsthand, the assessment can be biased by lots of factors internal to that juror. When a juror is shown a picture of a witness and told what to think about his/her personality by an authority figure, the assessment will necessarily rely on the external information rather than internal biases.

As you state, lots of studies have shown that we are more likely to assign positive personality attributes to attractive people. As many more studies have shown, once we have formed an opinion (even an extremely quick one), we are likely to process new information to fit our opinion rather than make us doubt ourselves.

In a real courtroom situation, the juror might form a quick negative opinion of your unattractive witness, then process all new ambiguous information in this context. The study does not account for these ingrained patterns of thought because the personality information is explicit (not ambiguous), it comes from an authority figure, and there is no opportunity for the subject/juror to draw her own conclusions.

To overcome the initial bias and the cognitive dissonance of an unattractive person behaving attractively, you have a much higher hill to climb than the study indicates. Every little thing helps, but I can imagine that your efforts might be more productively spent elsewhere.

[Jediah]

Upon further review, please repeal that last sentence of my previous post. It might be very productive to exhibit your witness's best personality traits, but I think the hill is very steep and you may need a number of more specialized techniques to do this effectively.

[Anne]

There was once a very funny and telling interview of Dolly Parton by Bob Edwards. Edwards asked whether she was ever frustrated by her appearance when she first started out in the business, worrying that people would be too distracted (this may well be one definition of "distraction task") and not take her talent seriously. Parton laughed. She's probably still laughing.

But this reminds me, too, of notorious trials in which the defendant is characterized as good-looking. Witness the "blue-eyed rapist," the "preppy murders," etc.