Researchers found that it is difficult to resist the temptation of assuming that a person's outward appearance reflects something meaningful about his or her inner personality.
Research has shown that people tend to perceive attractive adults as more social, successful, and well-adjusted than less attractive adults, a phenomenon that's been termed the "what is beautiful is good" stereotype.
Lihi Segal-Caspi and Sonia Roccas of the Open University and Lilach Sagiv of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem investigated whether the "what is beautiful is good" stereotype holds up in the real world.
The researchers examined how traits, which describe what people are like, and values, which describe what people consider important, might be related to physical attractiveness.
The researchers recruited 118 university students to serve as "targets" or "judges." The targets completed surveys about their values and their traits.
They were then videotaped entering a room, walking around a table looking at the camera, reading a weather forecast, and leaving the room.
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Each judge saw a videotape of a different target, chosen at random, and evaluated the target's values and traits and then her attractiveness, along with other physical attributes.
Women who were rated as attractive were perceived as having more socially desirable personality traits, such as extraversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness, just as the researchers hypothesised.
Attractive women were perceived as more likely to value achievement than less attractive women.
Targets' attractiveness, as rated by the judges, was associated with with their self-reported values and not with their personality traits.
Women who were rated as attractive were more likely to endorse values focused on conformity and submission to social expectations and self-promotion.
Segal-Caspi and colleagues conclude that although some people may think beauty and goodness go together, the results from this study indicate that beautiful people may tend to focus more on conformity and self-promotion than independence and tolerance.
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science.