pturing traits related to social cooperation, and power/competence capturing cues relevant to advantage in social competition, such as status and dominance. Here we show a robust and positive effect of increased beauty on social power/competence and a generally positive but more nuanced and variable effect on social warmth.
Past studies have shown that attractive people are expected to do better on the job, in school, and in life – and are treated that way – by being agreed with, deferred to, helped, and granted larger personal space. In a recent experimental study using a task for which physical attractiveness did not improve productivity, researchers demonstrated conclusively that employers expect physically attractive workers to perform better at their jobs and be more competent.
But, as sociologists Webster and Driskell noted when first proposing the idea of beauty as status, there are important differences between attractiveness and other status characteristics such as race or sex: beauty is a malleable characteristic. They predicted that, given the powerful effect of status, “attractiveness will assume increasing significance as other characteristics such as race and sex fall into disuse.” We suggest that attractiveness has assumed increasing significance, and will continue to do so as long as beauty remains an often unconscious proxy for status and ability.
The beauty halo effect has been called the “what is beautiful is good” effect. In our study, makeup increased inferences of warmth and cooperation (likability and trustworthiness) when faces were presented very briefly, but did not always do so on longer inspection. In general, there is less agreement about whether beauty invariably signals social cooperation, with some studies suggesting that there is a ”dark side” to beauty characterized by vanity, immodesty, or greater likelihood to cheat on a partner. Our findings suggest that it may be fruitful to disentangle the effects of beauty from beauty enhancement, or phenotype from extended phenotype here. It may be that natural beauty or natural appearing beauty leads to positive inferences of social cooperation, where more obvious beauty enhancement may lead to neutral or even negative inferences. Finally, our results provide additional evidence that judgments of facial trustworthiness and facial attractiveness are at least partially separable; the highest contrast makeup (glamorous) increased attractiveness significantly while at the same time decreasing judgments of trustworthiness.
Our study looked at one potential source of the cosmetics effect on face perception, increasing luminance contrast between the features (eyes and lips) and the surrounding skin, and looked for the first time at luminance contrast in African American and Hispanic faces. We found that cosmetics increased luminance contrast by significantly darkening the eyes and lips. Skin was neither significantly lightened nor darkened. However, luminance contrast effects for our natural look compared to a face without makeup was only marginally significant. It is likely that cosmetics induced image changes other than changes in luminance contrast contributed to our effects. These include possible changes in the smoothness of skin tone, in the redness of skin color or lip color, and in shading that accentuates the cheekbones. Previous research has shown that makeup can improve skin appearance, evenness, and texture to appear healthier, fertile, and youthful and that skin and lip color can contribute significantly to perception of sex typicality and attractiveness, with lip redness enhancing femininity and attractiveness of female Caucasian faces.
Finally, our study included only North American subjects; we do not know if such effects will be found in subjects from other cultures*.
In sum, we show that faces with cosmetics engage both fast, reflexive processes, and more deliberative conscious processes. The fast, automatic effects are uniformly strong and positive for all outcomes. In situations where a perceiver is under a high cognitive load or und