We think prettier people are smarter

A composite face averaged from nine men. (credit: flickr user: Jun'ichiro Seyama)

People often make assumptions about each other’s character traits based on facial features. While, to a limited extent, it seems like we can actually glean some reliable info about personality traits from someone’s face, we can also add a heaping pile of bias on top of that too. A paper in PLOS One explores one of these biases: the more attractive we think a person is, the more we’re inclined to think they’re intelligent. This “attractiveness halo” means that we’re likely to overestimate the intelligence of people we find attractive.

One of the complications in assessing something like this is that people vary in what they believe “intelligence” is. This is an entirely separate question from what any scientific consensus actually says about the concept of intelligence and how we measure it. Regardless of what science says, people will still have their own understanding of what the idea means, believing that intelligence is the result of things like a “growth mindset,” of conscientiousness, or of genetics.

This makes it a bit difficult to do an experiment. These different definitions of intelligence, the authors write, suggest that people will consider different things in a face to signal intelligence, leading to “less accurate perceptions of intelligence.” So just asking for people to rate the intelligence of a series of faces would be unlikely to identify our perceptions with a huge amount of accuracy. To account for this, the researchers decided to also ask about other ratings that could capture various beliefs about intelligence: conscientiousness, and academic performance.

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