Psychology Report
Physical Attractiveness & Stereotyping
Psychology Report
Abstract
This study was taken up to inspect the correlation that occurs between the assumptions and opinions individuals have of other people’s appearance. The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of appearance on how personality is perceived. A name of a previous researcher that has shown this is Edward Thorndike. He coined the “halo effect” which can be defined as being the influence of a worldwide evaluation of a person and how we perceive their attributes.
The hypothesis of this experiment is one tailed. A person who is perceived as being more attractive will have be given positive personality traits, a person who is less attractive. The null hypothesis is that people’s perception of attractiveness will not affect their judgement of that individual’s personality traits. The method that was used was experiment and the design used was independent groups.
The Independent Variable is a photograph of a woman with makeup on to make her look more attractive. Whereas, the Dependant Variable is the same photograph of the same woman, however she is made to look unattractive.
There were twenty students that took part in this experiment. One group was shown the photograph where the woman was looking attractive and the experimental group got shown the picture where the woman looked unattractive. Both of the groups then had to choose five different personality traits that they thought went with the image they were shown. In total there were five positive traits and five negative traits.
The results highlighted that the attractive photograph got a mean rating of 4. Whereas, the unattractive photograph got a mean of 0.8 positive personality traits.
Overall, this experimental hypothesis was accepted. The experiment indicated that the attractive picture got a much bigger percentage of positive personality traits than that of the unattractive one Furthermore, the null hypothesis can now be
Psychology Report
Abstract
This study was taken up to inspect the correlation that occurs between the assumptions and opinions individuals have of other people’s appearance. The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of appearance on how personality is perceived. A name of a previous researcher that has shown this is Edward Thorndike. He coined the “halo effect” which can be defined as being the influence of a worldwide evaluation of a person and how we perceive their attributes.
The hypothesis of this experiment is one tailed. A person who is perceived as being more attractive will have be given positive personality traits, a person who is less attractive. The null hypothesis is that people’s perception of attractiveness will not affect their judgement of that individual’s personality traits. The method that was used was experiment and the design used was independent groups.
The Independent Variable is a photograph of a woman with makeup on to make her look more attractive. Whereas, the Dependant Variable is the same photograph of the same woman, however she is made to look unattractive.
There were twenty students that took part in this experiment. One group was shown the photograph where the woman was looking attractive and the experimental group got shown the picture where the woman looked unattractive. Both of the groups then had to choose five different personality traits that they thought went with the image they were shown. In total there were five positive traits and five negative traits.
The results highlighted that the attractive photograph got a mean rating of 4. Whereas, the unattractive photograph got a mean of 0.8 positive personality traits.
Overall, this experimental hypothesis was accepted. The experiment indicated that the attractive picture got a much bigger percentage of positive personality traits than that of the unattractive one Furthermore, the null hypothesis can now be