Trustworthiness is Beautiful to Behold

Introduction First impressions are of critical importance when two individuals interact. Within seconds, judgments have been made and opinions formed about each other even though neither person has any previous information regarding the other. Often, these perceptions are the results of past experiences and the information from other sources, formulated based on similarities between the person and these sources of information. For instance, many categorizations and stereotypes are created over a period of years from the information we receive from music, television, families, social media, and our peers. One of the most critical factors involved in this decision-making process, physical appearance, greatly influences how we view other people; individuals perceived as more attractive are assigned more positive characteristics. On the opposite end of the spectrum, unattractive people are greatly associated with more negative attributes such as untrustworthiness and incompetence. As Aronson suggests “since we have categorized a person as good-looking or homely, we tend to attribute other qualities to that person; for example, good looking people are likely to strike us as being warmer, sexier, more exciting, and more delightful than homely people.” (376). This is commonly referred to as the Physical Attractiveness Stereotype or the “beauty is good” stereotype. For the purposes of this paper, the relationship between attractiveness and perceived trust, and by association competence will be examined from a random sampling of people through two different social experiments. People tend to associate competence in an individual who is generally perceived as more attractive than those who are not; in essence, the more attractive an individual is, the more that individual will be trusted and regarded by his or her peers.