even greater advantage than it was once believed to be. Attractive people seem to elicit an immediate response from others predisposing these others to accept their message. The research indicates that we automatically assign to attractive individuals certain favorable traits, such as talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence, and we make these judgments without being aware that we are being influenced by physical attractiveness. Cialdini finds much of this research unsettling for its implications as to how we make decisions, including evidence showing that our judicial system is also influenced by this same factor: "It now appears that unless they have used their attractiveness to commit a crime. . . good-looking people are likely to receive highly favorable treatment in the legal system" (Cialdini, 1985, 167). Research has shown that highly attractive people are more likely to obtain help when in need and are more persuasive in trying to change the opinions of an audience, with both sexes showing the same patterns of response. Professionals understand this fact and regularly exploit the advantage of physical attractiveness.
DeBono (1992) cites a study in which 160 college students observed a perfume advertisement featuring either a physically attractive or relatively unattractive spokesperson promoting a new perfume using relatively strong or relatively weak arguments. Before observing the ad, some subjects sampled the perfume. Those subjects who sampled the perfume were influenced more by the spokeswoman's attractiveness than by the strength of the arguments, and subjects not exposed to the perfume were more influenced by the strength of the arguments than by the spokesperson's attractiveness. Analysis of cognitive responses further suggested that subjects not exposed to the perfume may have been systematically processing the advertisement and subjects exposed to the perfume may have been heuristically processing the mes...