How would you rate your appearance on a scale from 0 to 100? The answer to this question depends on more than the mirror. A new study published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology has found a link between self-rated attractiveness and factors such as gender, education, optimism and emotional stability.
The authors - Adrian Furnham of the Norwegian Business School and David C. Semmelink of the University of Pretoria and the company Thomas International - conducted two studies. The first involved 799 working adults (58% women, mean age 47, 54% British). They rated their appearance on a scale from 0 to 100, reported demographic data, level of religiosity, political views and optimism, and also completed questionnaires on personality traits and workplace behavior.
The average self-rating of attractiveness was about 58 points. Men gave themselves roughly 3-4 points more than women, and university graduates 3.5 points more than people without higher education. Religious, optimistic and politically left-leaning participants also gave higher ratings. Among personality traits, competitiveness and emotional stability (the ability to stay calm and maintain a stable mood) were most strongly linked to self-rating. Tolerance of uncertainty (comfort in unclear situations), by contrast, was linked to lower ratings.
In the second study, with 292 participants, the authors checked whether these links would hold and added a test of mental ability. Not all the results were confirmed: higher education, optimism and emotional stability again showed a link to higher self-rated appearance. But gender, political views, competitiveness and tolerance of uncertainty turned out to be non-significant in the final analysis, and the link with religiosity disappeared once intelligence test results were taken into account.
Curiously, higher scores on mental ability were linked to slightly lower self-rated appearance. However, the contribution of intelligence to differences between people was only about 1%. The authors suggest that people with high intelligence may be more realistic or honest in assessing their appearance. Having a degree, by contrast, was associated with a higher self-rating - possibly because a degree serves as a more visible social signal of ability than a test result.
All the measured factors together explained about 15% of the differences in self-rating in the first study and 23% in the second. This means that most of the variation is determined by other, unmeasured causes. The authors also noted that the British on average rated their appearance lower than participants from the US, Canada, Australia and South Africa, but cautioned that the country groups differed greatly in size, so the conclusion is preliminary.
It is important to emphasize that these are statistical associations that by themselves do not prove cause-and-effect relationships. For example, optimism may influence self-rated appearance, or it may be the other way around, or both factors may be determined by something third. In addition, the study relied on a single question about attractiveness and did not take into account ratings by outside observers, so it is impossible to say how accurately participants assessed their appearance.
"Statistical significance is not the same as social significance," Furnham noted. "None of our effects was large, but we replicated the results in two studies." According to him, it is important to be aware of one's own characteristics - abilities, emotional intelligence, attractiveness - since both underestimation and overestimation can have negative consequences.