Physical Beauty & Persuasion

Much of our culture is based on physical attractiveness and its power to persuade, to attract, to influence, and in a real sense to succeed. Our advertising media clearly believe in the power of physical attractiveness to persuade, and spokespersons for products and other people used in television commercials and print ads tend to be physically attractive far beyond the norm in society, apparently based on the belief that we tend to listen more closely to a message delivered by someone who is physically attractive. We are certainly attracted to beauty, though our definition of beauty will differ from person to person and even from context to context. It seems clear then that we would tend to listen to someone who is physically attractive, in essence paying more attention to them than we would to someone who was not physically attractive. It is not as clear that we would be persuaded by beauty instead of by the strength of the message delivered. Those who feel that physical beauty and persuasion go hand in hand are effectively identifying physical beauty itself as persuasive so that the mere presence of physical beauty is an argument in itself. This has been and should be analyzed through social scientific theory, postulating that physical attractiveness will increase persuasive effects, and testing this empirically.

An analysis of the literature shows that this approach has been taken. The method undertaken here is a review of literature to clari

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usness of the accident itself (Kulka and Kessler 366-381). Weiten (notes the large number of studies in recent years of the jury, and he proposes to study the attractiveness-leniency effect whereby judges and juries are less stringent with defendants who are attractive. This is a replication of an earlier study utilizing a role-playing experiment in which 112 undergraduates (65 female, 47 male) enrolled in introductory psychology or biology courses were subjected to a 2 * 2 factorial design, with the two factors being the defendant's social attractiveness (attractive vs. unattractive) and the judge's instructions (present vs. absent). Results showed that the attractive defendant was better liked than the unattractive defendant, and that subjects who were exposed to the judge's instructions were better able to answer a question on the criteria of guilt than were the uninstructed subjects. The attractive defendant was found to receive a more lenient sentence than the unattractive defendant, and the presence or absence of judge's instructions did not differentially affect these sentencing judgments (Weiten 348-361). DeBono and Harnish cite a study in which 160 college students observed a perfume advertisement in which either a p

Category: Psychology - P